


Nothing Gold Can Stay

by typical_art_dork



Series: get in the car, loser, we're healing from trauma [4]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: 80s movie discourse, Die mad about it, Emotional Support bf Jonathan Byers, F/F, Fluff, Found Family, Good Babysitter Steve Harrington, Good Friend Robin Buckley, Good Parent Jim "Chief" Hopper, Good Parent Joyce Byers, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Maxine "Max" Mayfield Needs a Hug, Nightmares, Platonic Madwheeler let's goooo, Protective Steve Harrington, Road Trips, Sleepovers, Stopped writing for a few months & instantly forgot how to tag, Yes the title is a reference to The Outsiders, slice-of-life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:29:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29455305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typical_art_dork/pseuds/typical_art_dork
Summary: Max stares at him, and her mouth falls open a little, and then El says, “Why are you crying?”And shit, El’s right, she’s crying. Her lip’s quivering, and her shoulders are shaking, and she’s frozen in place between Steve’s car and her house. He’s frozen too, for a second, because this is Max: strong-willed, take-no-shit, invincible Max, crying in the cold, and then El’s unlocking the car door with her powers and hopping out of the backseat, and Steve comes back to himself, throws open the driver’s side door.Steve thinks this must be what it feels like to be trapped underwater beneath a layer of ice: watching Max cry and not being able to do anything about it.OR: Steve and Robin go on a road trip, make a few unexpected discoveries, and try their best to show Max what a family is supposed to feel like.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper/Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington, Maxine "Max" Mayfield & Mike Wheeler, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington & The Party, Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler, Steve Harrington & The Party
Series: get in the car, loser, we're healing from trauma [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1728592
Comments: 16
Kudos: 59





	Nothing Gold Can Stay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asexualjuliet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asexualjuliet/gifts).



> I know it's been a long time since I've posted, and I know it's not really Christmas time anymore, but I started this a while ago and just got the motivation to finish it, and I'm pretty proud of the finished product. Feedback & constructive criticism is much appreciated! Happy reading!
> 
> I gifted this to asexualjuliet bc their "Scraped Knees and Cotton Ball Wars" fic inspired the Max-and-Mike dynamic throughout this fic! If you're reading this, you've probably already read a ton of their works, but if you haven't, you need to. They have the character's voices down to a T.

DECEMBER

Just to be clear, Steve didn’t sign up for this.

Well, technically, he did-- he’d signed the same contract Robin had when they finally found the apartment-- but he hadn’t been anticipating the absolute shitshow that Moving Day was going to be at the time, and now he’s holding a heavy-ass dresser on one end while Jonathan tries to fit the other end through the doorway of Steve and Robin’s new home and the kids unload boxes in what he can only assume will be the living room. Robin’s got some jazz record on, something cheerful and vaguely Christmas-y that she borrowed from Hop, and Steve kind of wants to chuck it across the room in pure unbridled rage, but that’s an emotion he’ll have to examine some other time, when he isn’t actively losing feeling in both of his hands (as if the December chill wasn’t enough to give him pins and needles). 

“What the FUCK, Jon, just shove it through the doorway--”

“That’s five dollars!” El shouts gleefully from somewhere behind him. “Max, get the swear jar!”

There’s a faint rustling sound, and then Dustin whoops delightedly. “Got it! Hey, we almost have enough for a new skateboard for Max!”

“You’re kidding,” Max breathes. And then, “Steve, pay up!”

Steve winces, shifts his weight. “Kinda in the middle of something here, Red, but I swear I’ll get it to you later.”

“I’m holding you to that,” Max says, and he can hear the smile in her voice. It almost makes him forget about the dresser-crushing-him situation, for a second. 

A couple of weeks ago, Max’s piece of shit stepdad (creatively dubbed “The Bastard” by Joyce) threw a tantrum when Max left her skateboard in the driveway-- he hadn’t seen it when he was coming home from work, or some shit, and he’d run right over it, chipping the paint on his car and splintering the board beyond repair. 

Worse than Max’s crushed, mangled skateboard, though, was the bruise he left on her cheek; she’d shown up at the Byers’ that night in a sweater that Steve recognized as Mike’s (he’d lent her winter clothes when The Bastard got laid off in the fall), shivering and looking only half-alive. She’d gotten a ride from Ms. Ellingham, this kind old lady that lives across the street from her, so she was calmed down enough to explain what happened without crying, but Steve still had to leave the room and take a breather halfway through. He didn’t want her to get freaked out by how pissed he was. 

Now, though, she’s laughing at something Will’s said, and talking over him as the rest of the little shitheads try to top the joke. It’s something they’ve been doing lately-- trying to outdo each other constantly. Just last week, they’d been making gingerbread houses at the Wheelers’, and El had toppled Mike’s entire house with her powers-- gumdrops and icing and peppermints everywhere, it was a damn catastrophe. Worse, she had no real reason for doing it; she maintains that it was on a dare from Max, which, fair-- but still. Robin chalked it up to the fact that it’s winter break and they’re all reverting back to their “strange little child brains”, but Steve thinks they might be acting out because of the fact that he and Robin are leaving the Byers’.

He doesn’t really want to think about that right now, though. Couldn’t think about it if he wanted to, holding this billion-pound dresser. 

“Jonathan! Just SHOVE it THROUGH the door frame--”

Jonathan huffs an exasperated sigh, and despite the chaos around them, Steve feels something flutter in his chest. 

“I’m TRYING to, it’s, like, stuck,” he grits out, throwing all his weight against the dresser. Suddenly, it gives, and Steve stumbles back as Jonathan regains his footing. They let go of it at the same time, and it lands squarely in the entryway of the apartment. 

From across the room, Robin rolls her eyes fondly; Steve wants to swat at her, but she’s too far away. He shakes out his hands instead, wincing when the blood rushes back into them. 

“Took you idiots long enough,” Rob says breezily, and it sounds so Nancy-like that Steve does a double-take as she pushes past them and out the door, lifting a stack of boxes Jonathan left outside the room. 

Mike notices, too, and he cuts his eyes at Steve like, ‘See? Told you.’

The kid swore to him a couple weeks ago that Nancy and Robin were “morphing into the same person” when they were apart, like they adapted to each other’s language and mannerisms so easily that they inherited each other’s traits altogether. Steve scoffed at him then, muttering that Robin would never flounce around like Nancy does, but here she is, moving through their apartment all airily. 

It’s weird. But then again, Steve’s gotten weird since dating Jonathan-- he actively listens to The Talking Heads now. Like, if he’s in the car with Robin or the little shitheads and they’re screaming at him to put a tape on, he’ll pull one of the ones Jonathan lent him out and laugh when the kids groan in frustration. ‘We’ve listened to this like a MILLION TIMES,’ Lucas yelled last week, swatting at the back of Steve’s headrest to mess up his hair. ‘Yeah, Steve,’ Dustin sighed, ‘it’s getting kinda old.’

In his defense, the “Little Creatures” album is unbeatable. 

“Steve,” Max demands, shaking the swear jar in his face and pulling him out of his reverie. “Pay. Up.”

“You got it, kid,” he says, depositing a ten-dollar bill in the jar of wadded-up cash. 

Max’s face lights up, and El does a little dance as she counts the money out to double-check the value. 

Robin breezes back into the room, depositing the stack of boxes beside the dresser. The kids all crowd around them immediately, Lucas brandishing the boxcutter he insisted upon using. 

“Careful with that,” Steve says, and Robin snorts out a little laugh. Maybe he’s doing the Mom Stance again-- yep, his hands are on his hips. Shit. 

The kids are giggling at him, so he relaxes and lets Lucas past him to slice open the boxes. The kid’s face lights up, and Dustin looks a little concerned. Steve doesn’t blame him.

Just as the kids and Jonathan start pulling Robin’s vinyl collection out of the first box, the door to the apartment swings open and Hopper saunters in, waving a copy of the key at them by way of greeting. A rush of cold air floods into the room, and Robin shivers a little. Steve drapes an arm around her, and Hop smiles in that gruff, fatherly way of his and shuts the door.

“Alright, guys,” Hopper says to the kids, who are currently running through the apartment to find Robin’s room and record table, “put those away and then meet me outside. Joyce wants Will and Jonathan back home to help her make fudge.”

As if on cue, Will shuffles back into the living room and falls back dramatically onto Steve and Robin’s couch. They’d found it at a thrift store across town-- Robin had taken one look at the green vintage floral print and insisted they buy it. Steve couldn’t say no.

“Last time I checked, I wasn’t Will,” Max quips from somewhere in Rob’s room. Jonathan huffs his quiet little laugh from beside Steve. Adorable. 

“Yeah,” Dustin shouts, jogging back into the living room empty-handed. “Why do we have to leave if--”

“Because,” Hopper grits out, pinching the bridge of his nose-- it reminds Steve of himself, for a second, which is a little weird and definitely not a thought he wants to entertain right now. “Where Will goes, Mike goes, and where Mike goes, the rest of you follow.”

“Fair enough,” Lucas says, slinging an arm around Mike as they make their way back to the living room. Mike pulls a mildly-disgusted face and shakes Lucas off of him, plopping down on the couch beside Will, who tangles their feet together and grins. 

“I’m only going if El goes,” Max declares, startling Robin when she reappears seemingly out of nowhere. She has a habit of sneaking up on everyone, and it would be endearing if Steve could get the implications of Max being silent on her feet out of his head. Kids only get good at staying quiet if they need to. It’s why Will and El are so soft-spoken, and why Jonathan can make laps around the Byers’ house in his heavy winter boots without anyone knowing he’s home. 

“I’ll go,” El says eagerly, shaking Steve out of his thoughts. He doesn’t know if she’s ever made Christmas cookies before. 

“Yeah, it’ll be fun,” Will chimes in. “El’s never decorated cookies for Christmas before. We can show her how to roll out the dough and frost them and add sprinkles-- Mom always gets the best sprinkles, the glittery kind-- and how to dip them in milk for just the right amount of time--” 

“Alright, I’m sold,” Dustin cuts in, earning a laugh from Robin. She’s perched on the arm of the couch now, tucking her hair behind her ears. Steve feels something warm bloom in his chest at the sight of her, still disheveled from her nap in the car, and he fights back a smile when the kids all jump up and she wobbles slightly on the arm of the couch. Jonathan steadies her with a hand on her shoulder, and she rolls her eyes at him, like, ‘I’m fine, idiot.’

“Alright, anklebiters, in the car,” Hopper directs, ruffling El’s hair as she and Max lead the group to the door. 

Jonathan plants a quick kiss on Steve’s forehead and follows the little dipshits into the hall; Steve can hear him talking them through who’s riding with who as Max and El insist on going with him instead of Hopper.

“It’s a twenty-minute car ride, guys,” Jonathan’s saying, sounding equal parts fond and exasperated as El and Max shout over Lucas. 

“Wait, Steve!” Dustin exclaims, turning as Mike shoves his way past him into the hall, “You and Robin are coming over later, right?”

Steve looks at Robin, who grins and nods at him. “Yeah, we’ll be there,” he declares. Dustin smiles so wide it looks like it kind of hurts, pumps his fist in the air celebratorily, and hurries after the rest of the little shitheads. 

Hopper shakes his head at the kid and salutes Steve and Robin on his way out. Robin laughs and salutes him back, and for a second Steve forgets about the mountains of boxes they have to unload. 

Then, as the door shuts with a weird ominous creak that Steve’s positive Joyce will know how to fix, Robin starts up another record and turns to face the piles of unopened boxes laid out before them. Steve sighs. 

“This is the un-fun part, I know, but we’ll get it all done quicker with Ella’s beautiful voice helping us stay on ta--”

“Jesus Christ, you and your Fitzgerald oldies,” Steve laughs, lunging for the nearest box and the boxcutter Lucas left lying precariously on the coffee table (also a thrift shop find-- it was a dusty little number when Rob dragged it out of the back room, but they painted it forest green to match the couch, and now Steve guesses it’s okay). 

“Shut up, you love her Christmas album,” Robin replies, grinning as Steve hacks into the box. It’s full of books, and Steve passes it to her-- her home library is not his to meddle with. No one touches Robin’s encyclopedias, or her Russian dictionary, or the Nancy Drew novels she’s annotating for Nance as a future Christmas gift. 

“Thank you very much, good sir,” she says in a poor imitation of a Trans-Atlantic accent. 

“Of course, madam,” he replies, slicing into his own box of community college textbooks: Psych 1101, Cognitive Psychology, Human Communication, Stats-- all the courses necessary to pursue the degree that’s sunk its teeth into Steve. He used to be undecided, even considered joining Hop at the station, but Robin saw the way he worked with the kids and his investment in their mental health and suggested adolescent psychology, and it stuck. 

“Your accent fucking sucks,” she tells him, all deadpan, as she leaves the room in pursuit of her bookshelf, and Steve grins to himself as the song changes. 

Twelve more boxes to go. Steve hopes Robin has more than one Christmas record; this is going to take a while. 

\--

Three hours and twelve hastily-unpacked boxes later (they contained, in no particular order: Steve’s snow globe collection; Robin’s unnecessary amount of shoes, ranging from beat-up sneakers to pristine Doc Martens; the numerous walkie talkies and monster-hunting equipment the little shitheads had gifted Steve over the years; about fifty eclectic coffee mugs; all of Nancy’s sweaters that Robin’s borrowed; and a fuckton of dishes, candles, pottery, and other random crap Rob’s collected from the thrift stores in Hawkins), Steve and Robin roll up the snow-dusted driveway of the Byers house. Their porch light is on, and it casts a warm golden glow over the walkway. Robin pulls open Steve’s car door for him and leads him up the steps. 

Before either of them can knock, Max is at the door, rosy-cheeked with a cozy-looking El clinging to her side. They’re wearing matching grins and sweaters; Steve recognizes the maroon thread from Nancy’s stash of knitting supplies, and he smiles back at the kids in turn. 

“Is that Steve and Robin?” Will yells from inside, and El nods and bounces over to him as Max lets them in. 

Will, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas are all huddled in a circle around Joyce’s Christmas tree, hanging up ornaments that Jonathan passes them. Hopper and Joyce are both in the kitchen-- Steve can hear her explaining the cookie-making process to him, as if she hasn’t burned every batch she’s tried to make over the years. Jonathan had regaled all of Joyce’s baking disasters to Steve after she’d almost burned the kitchen down the night they tried to make a birthday cake for Robin. 

“Hey, weirdos,” Robin greets, and Dustin and Lucas turn and break into grins. Mike waves, and almost drops a polar-bear-shaped ornament; Jonathan pales, and starts passing all the unbreakables to the kids instead of the ones made of glass. El begins levitating the heavier ones, smiling as Max cheers her on. 

“It’s pretty crowded around the tree, but you guys can help bake the cookies,” Jonathan says by way of greeting, ruffling Steve’s hair. What an asshole; he knows how much effort Steve puts into his routine. 

Robin, bless her, smooths his hair back down and pulls Jonathan’s beanie over his eyes in retaliation. 

“You got it, Byers number two,” she says, laughing and pulling Steve into the kitchen when Jonathan fake-lunges at her. Her laugh mingles with the kids’ frenzied conversation, and Steve feels himself start to relax. His back still aches like a bitch, but here in the Byers’ living room, surrounded by the kids and this old, static-y Christmas music and Joyce and Hopper’s muddled conversation, he feels much lighter.

In the warm glow of the kitchen, Joyce is already at work rolling out the cookie dough. Hopper smiles at Steve and Robin as they walk in, and Steve is a little surprised to find that it’s genuine. 

“Alright,” Joyce says, all business, “Robin can help me roll out the rest of the dough, and you guys can go ahead and preheat the oven, okay?”

“And I’m assuming I’ll be keeping an eye on them once they’re in the oven, considering your track record with burning cookies,” Hop says, earning a halfhearted glare from Joyce. Robin grabs the nearest dish towel and flicks it at him, and Joyce outright laughs at the scandalized expression on his face. 

Hopper preheats the oven as Robin kind of murders her cookie dough, slamming it into the flour as Joyce tries not to laugh, and Steve just sort of stands there watching until El bounds into the kitchen and pulls him back into the living room. 

“Alright, everyone,” Jonathan’s saying, looking adorably disgruntled as the little dipshits all yell over each other, “just calm down. Chill. Okay, so we’re gonna decide who gets to do it in a fair way, and--”

“If I don’t get to put the star on the tree, I’m killing myself tomorrow,” Mike deadpans, and Max throws her head back and laughs as the rest of the kids break into a flurry of commotion.

“You did it last year, you bitch,” Lucas half-yells at Mike, who rolls his eyes so hard it kind of pains Steve, for a second. 

“Lucas, you would knock the whole tree over,” Dustin cuts in, earning a nod of silent agreement from El. 

“He would,” she agrees sagely. 

“I think Will should do it,” Max pipes up, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s his house.”

“Will hasn’t helped all afternoon,” Mike says, and Will looks equally betrayed and amused. 

“He’s right, actually,” the kid agrees, and Mike grins this shit-eating grin and pulls Will in for a side-hug. Lucas fake-retches, and Max rolls her eyes at him. 

“Okay, okay, everyone shut up,” Jonathan orders, throwing his arm out in this wide sweeping gesture like he’s putting some spell on all the kids to quiet them. “If we’re using the merit system, I think we’re down to Dustin or Max. Dustin put, like, half of the ornaments on the tree, and Max caught a bunch that Mike almost dropped. So it’s down to them, okay?”

“So how do we decide who did the more important job?” El asks. 

Jonathan looks lost for a moment, and Steve feels a pang of sympathy when he notices the bags under his eyes. 

“I have an idea,” Steve says, and all the kids turn in unison to look at him; it’s creepy as fuck how hive-minded they can be sometimes, but it’s also kind of cute. 

“It’s snowing pretty hard out there, right? So, uh, how about a snowball fight? Dustin’s the captain of one team, Max is the captain of the other. The captain of the team that wins gets to put the star on top.”

For an agonizing moment, the little shits are dead silent. 

“He’s a genius,” Dustin breathes, and they race for their coats and boots, the boys letting out these weird battle cries as Max flings open the door and they parade down the driveway into the front yard. 

Jonathan smiles at Steve, shouldering on his jacket, and they follow the kids out into the bitter cold. 

The sky is slate-gray, and heavy white clouds hang low over the horizon. The kids are already breaking off into teams: Mike and Lucas make a frenzied beeline for Dustin, and El and Will hurry to Max’s side. 

“Okay, everyone,” Jonathan directs, “This is gonna be a fair fight. Whoever surrenders first loses. The captain of the winning team is our victor and ordained Keeper of the Tree Topper, tasked with the sacred tradition of putting the star on the Byers Family Christmas Tree. This is a great honor, and Steve and I will see to it that our victor is fairly decided.”

He looks to Steve, all rosy-cheeked in the cold, and Steve feels his heart skip a beat before he turns to the kids. “Yeah, what he said,” he adds. 

“Can we fight now?” El asks innocently. She’s already holding three snowballs in the air, poised to strike. 

“Yeah, go for it, dipshits,” Steve says, then immediately wishes he hadn’t. 

Almost instantaneously, El vaults each snowball at Dustin, Mike, and Lucas, who all duck but still get hit, anyway. As they scramble to make their own snowballs, Max chucks the ones she’s made at Dustin; he rolls out of the way of the last one, coating his jacket, pants, and hair with snow.

“El, I love you so much right now!” Max shouts, dodging a hastily-lobbed snowball from Mike; in the five minutes it took Dustin’s team to make maybe ten snowballs, El’s constructed a fort of sorts out of the surrounding snow with her powers. It’s tall and dense enough to shield Max’s team from Dustin’s, and even the snowballs Lucas is pelting at it aren’t enough to make it crumble. 

“This is completely unfair--!” Dustin shouts, sputtering when a snowball to the mouth cuts him off. 

“Bow down to your ice queen, Henderson!” Max yells in reply, chucking another snowball at him from over the wall. 

It’s looking bad for Dustin’s team-- with El’s powers, Max’s unparalleled rage, and Will’s surprisingly quick snowball-making abilities, the opposing team is doomed. They have a whole goddamn system: Will’s constructing perfectly-circular ammo and handing it off to Max, who’s flinging each one over the wall with shocking accuracy. Steve should tell her to try out for the volleyball team in the spring; with the rate she’s going, she’d be the captain by fall semester. 

“Alright, ALRIGHT, I have a plan,” Mike says, dodging one of Max’s snowballs; it hits Lucas in the face instead, and he glares at Mike like he’s the one that threw it. 

“Yeah, well hurry up and tell us, we’re dying out here!” Dustin screams from maybe three feet away-- he’s trying and failing to build up a wall of his own. “Jesus Christ, how the hell did she do this?! It keeps falling!”

“Just listen, dipshit,” Mike says fiercely, and Steve’s beginning to question if this was really his brightest idea. He knows the kids can get. . . intense about shit, sure, but this is a whole new level of crazy.

“If I go running at their fort, I can knock it over. I know I can. The velocity, and. . . force. . . listen, I fell asleep for most of physics class, but you get the point. And then, after it’s toppled, you guys can chuck enough snowballs at them to get them to surrender. It’s the only thing protecting them. Well, that, and. . . Max’s wrath.”

Lucas and Dustin gawk at him; Jonathan muffles a laugh into Steve’s shoulder. 

“Dude, you’d sacrifice yourself for us?”

Mike nods gravely, zipping up his navy puffer jacket with an air of single-minded determination. “I mean, I guess so. We’re kind of out of options.”

“Mike, if anything happens out there, just know I love you,” Dustin says, batting an incoming snowball away from his chest.

Mike looks back at him once, kind of disgustedly. “Gross.”

And with that, he goes barreling straight for El’s carefully-curated snow fort, slamming into it and sending Max, Will, and El sprawling. 

“What the FUCK,” Max screeches. She’s flat on her back, pinwheeling her arms frantically as she tries to get up.

“Language!” Steve admonishes. 

“ATTACK!” Lucas yells, and Dustin starts pelting snowballs at the opposing team, finally just giving up and grabbing handfuls of snow to throw at all of them. 

“I am never having children,” Jonathan deadpans. 

Finally, in a blur of frenzied attacks from both teams, Max raises a hand and waves it in the air; she’s half-covered in snow, even her eyelashes glow white in the setting sun. 

“We surrender!” she shouts, just as Mike vaults another snowball at her. She ducks out of the way, glaring in his direction. “Jesus, Wheeler!”

“Sorry,” he mutters, sounding surprisingly sincere. 

Jonathan calls it, and Dustin helps Max up onto her feet. He grins toothily at her as the others brush snow off of their jackets. 

“Good game?” he asks, and Max grins back at him. 

“Yeah. Good game.” 

And then, with all the swiftness of a late-for-class Nancy Wheeler, Max produces a perfectly-crafted snowball from behind her back and hurls it directly at Dustin’s face. 

As usual, she’s right on target. 

“What the hell?!” the kid sputters, shaking snow out of his hair like a wet dog. 

Almost instantly, teams and alliances are forgotten, and the rest of the kids start laughing, and then, Mike and Lucas are high-fiving a grinning Max, and Jonathan’s smiling so hard it looks like it hurts, ushering the gleeful little dipshits inside after instructing each of them to shed their snow-covered jackets and boots at the door. 

Steve trudges over to Dustin and brushes the rest of the snow from his hair; the kid smiles up at him, and he feels this lightness ease the pain in his shoulders. He’s felt heavy since this morning; unloading all those boxes was harder on him than he thought. The whole move was, really. 

Inside, the kids are sprawled out on the floor around the tree, donning blankets and sweaters; apparently, Nance had made one for all of them, an early Christmas gift before her departure to stay with some NYU friends up in the Big Apple. Steve thinks her vacation away from them, while bittersweet, is well-deserved.

Joyce is passing around plates of star and tree-shaped cookies, laughing as Hopper gloats about the cookies being only a little burnt this time, because he’d kept an eye on them, god dammit. Robin’s tucked away in one of the armchairs in the corner, smiling this knowing little smile at everyone. She looks just as tired as the kids must feel, but she also looks happy, so Steve isn’t too worried. He’ll force her to take another nap on the way back to the apartment-- he would call it home, but it doesn’t feel that way just yet. 

He pulls Jonathan with him as he heads over to her. 

“Hey, Robs, you missed a shit ton of hilarity out there,” Steve says by way of greeting. She nods, laughing a little, her eyes on Max and El as they cuddle under one of the community blankets. He thinks she might be missing Nancy. 

“Yeah, I guessed as much when the little weirdos all paraded in here looking like they got attacked by a yeti.” 

“Yeah, well, that’s their own fault. It’s weird, it’s like the older they get, the wilder they are. We had to practically drag some of them off of each other; they’re so violent.”

“Max scares me even more than El does, and that’s saying something,” Lucas says from his place on the floor, sandwiched between Mike and Dustin. 

Max glares at him in faux-offense, and El smiles proudly. “I didn’t know I scared you,” she says quietly, a little in awe of herself. Max laughs, drapes an arm around her. 

“Hey, shouldn’t one of you be putting the star on the tree?” Jonathan asks the group, tossing the tree topper to Dustin. The kid salutes him, then stands up and looks, a little nervously, at the stepladder Joyce has dragged out of the hall closet. 

“So I just climb up and stick it on, right?”

Mike rolls his eyes, and Lucas nods. “Yeah, man, you got this.”

“Don’t fall,” Will warns. 

“Thanks, that’s really helpful, Will,” Dustin gripes, making his way up the ladder will all the grace of a five-year-old. He wobbles for a moment once he’s on the top step, and Steve feels his breath catch in his throat. 

“Shit,” Dustin grits out. From her place on the ground, El steadies him-- well, the ladder, really-- with a twist of her wrist. 

The color returns to the kid’s face, and he carefully, painstakingly places the star on the uppermost branch of the Byers Family Christmas Tree.

Abruptly, Will starts to clap, and it startles Dustin so much that he nearly falls again.

“Jesus Christ, Byers, you almost gave me a heart attack,” the kid says when he’s safe on solid ground again, all the rest of the kids crowding around him to high-five him or, in Max’s case, snark about how the star’s crooked.

“Oh, it looks great,” Joyce says when she and Hopper reappear in the living room, holding mugs of hot chocolate for Will, Mike, and Max-- Lucas prefers tea or cider, Dustin’s allergic to cocoa, and El has a weird habit of eating the powder straight from the packet instead of drinking it heated with milk like a normal person.

The kids take their drinks gratefully, Mike sloshing his over the sides of his mug almost immediately. Max laughs at him, only a little derisively, and Will smiles and offers hjm a napkin. 

As the little dipshits finally settle down, Jonathan drags Steve over to the couch, and they fall back onto the blankets and cushions and pillows, kind of tangled together. 

Robin smiles at them, looking even more tired now that nighttime is sweeping over them. The only sources of light in the room are the lamps Joyce’s lit and the colorful lights strung around the tree. They cast a cheerful glow over the kids, who have abandoned their mugs of cocoa for their latest campaign-- Mike must have left it there a week or so ago, the last time they were all in one place together. 

“Holy shit, Max! You roll the dice, you don’t throw them!”

“I’m sorry,” Max says in a tone that conveys just how unapologetic she actually is, “I was trying to buy us time, Sinclair!”

“Time isn’t real,” Mike mutters. 

“Oh, so it’s Sinclair now?” Lucas huffs, glowering across the room at her as Dustin searches frantically for the dice in question. “Alright, Mayfield, I see how it is.”

“Calm down, shitheads,” Steve sighs from the couch. Jonathan laughs, and he can feel the vibration from the sound course through him. 

“Let them gripe,” Robin tells him, twisting a lock of hair around one finger. The lamp beside them is painting her in sweeping shades of peach and orange, and it makes Steve vaguely nostalgic for some reason. “They’re only this age for so long.”

“I’m going to be Eleven forever,” El comments, smiling smugly as Max laughs. 

“Jesus Christ,” Hopper sighs across the room. “Never run outta jokes, do you, kid?” 

“She’s a bottomless pit of hilarity,” Dustin informs everyone, grinning toothily and holding up the dice for the rest of the dipshits to see. “We rolled a thirteen.”

They break out into cheers all at once, all high-fives and spilling laughter and pent-up excitement, and Steve looks at Robin and smiles in the dim light. Her eyes have this glint in them, a knowing look that she shoots Steve or Nancy or Jonathan when the kids are acting like kids again. It’s nights like this, when they’re hyped up on sugar-highs and playing games and shouting like elementary-schoolers, that Steve remembers that they’re all way younger than they actually act most of the time. Max, Lucas, and Mike walk around with stone-cold, serious-as-hell looks on their faces most of the time, Dustin’s vocabulary is probably even more extensive than Nancy’s, and El and Will talk like they’ve lived a thousand different lives, like they’re infinite; it’s good to see them acting their age. It makes something like hope blossom in Steve’s chest, grip him for a moment, as the dipshits all celebrate their win. 

Jonathan runs his fingers through Steve’s hair as they watch the kids, all high-fiving and laughing and looking like twelve-year-olds again even though they’re in high school, and as the snow starts coming down again and Joyce and Hopper retire to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, he feels so at home that it almost kills him.

He looks over at Robin, and she’s asleep. 

\--

A week later, the new apartment is starting to resemble less of a Clorox-scented white box and more of an actual living space. 

Robin’s got all these movie posters taped up everywhere-- Pulp Fiction and Adventures in Babysitting and Star Wars all in a neat line on the wall above their couch, The Breakfast Club and The Outsiders in her bedroom-- and she’s tacked all these polaroids of the kids and Nancy and Steve and Jonathan around the place, too. Steve’s strung up not-really-Christmas lights; they’re tiny, twinkly string lights that are clear instead of multicolored, and they cast a cozy glow over their living room. 

Robin found a bunch of weird Persian rugs at the thrift store downtown, and these cool multicolored vases she’s lined up on the kitchen counter. Joyce brought over flowers earlier to fill the vases, and now the kitchen smells like roses. 

So, of course, the kids love it. Dustin dubs it their second home the minute he walks through the door. 

It goes something like this. 

“Holy shit!” 

The kids come barreling in, already riled up from the car ride with Jonathan. He trails in after them, looking tired as hell. 

“Morning, shitheads,” Steve says as they pass him. Max and El go straight for the coffee, but Robin beats them to it; she’s just trudged out of her room, and her hair’s all matted to one side. Mike and Lucas laugh, and she glares at them.

“Why are they here so early?” Robin breathes, looking around at the kids with thinly-veiled terror. 

“Well, Mom said you guys were done fixing the place up and since we were all awake we just. . . begged Jonathan to drive us here so we could see it,” Will explains.

“How were you all awake at the same time? It’s not even seven a.m.--”

Mike elbows past Will. sighing like he’s talking to a kid even though it’s the other damn way around. 

“Here’s how it works: Will has a walkie talkie. I have a walkie talkie. When I woke up at five-thirty in the morning to the sound of Will yelling at me about your guys’ apartment, I wanted to actually die. But then, I realized I could rope everyone else in with me so I wouldn’t be dying alone. El was already up, because she’s a fucking lunatic--” 

“Language!” Steve interjects, to which Mike rolls his eyes and continues, “--and by extension, Max was up, because she was sleeping over at El’s. So the only two people left were Dustin and Lucas, so I called them and convinced them to go too because I’m a master negotiator.”

“You threatened me with Movie Night dish duty for a week,” Dustin says. “That’s not negotiation, it’s dictatorship.”

“No, dictatorship would be ordering you to be on dish duty with no alternative--”

“Since when did Mike earn the authority to dole out threats and punishments?” Jonathan asks wearily. 

Dustin shrugs. “I don’t know, gimme a break, man. It was six in the morning. I heard “dish duty” and suddenly I cared about the apartment. It is cool, though; Robin did a good job.”

“Hey, I helped,” Steve says, only slightly offended. Robs did do most of the work, because she’s artsy and cool and has an eye for stuff like this. The lights were his idea, though, so.

El glances around at everything a second time. “Don’t buy it.” Then, after a beat, “So what are we doing today?”

Robin stares at all of the kids for a silent, alarmingly long moment, then turns and pours herself a mug of coffee twice the size that she usually has. 

“Robin, hurry up!” Max complains. “If I don’t have caffeine right now, I’m going to die.”

“The last thing any of you need is coffee,” Jonathan says, scrubbing a hand over his face. Steve puts an arm around him, and he looks slightly less chagrined. 

Robin stares Jonathan dead in the eyes as she pours Max and El each a mug of their own. Steve knows it pained her to do it, but she loves messing with Jon, and she can never say no to Max. He hides a laugh behind his hand as the girls stare, sparkly-eyed, at the array of creamers in the fridge. 

Jonathan shudders as El dumps a metric shit ton of sugar into her coffee. 

“You’re gonna regret that when they turn into hyperactive, evil little gremlins,” says Dustin, ducking when Max throws a sugar packet at him. 

“Gremlins?” El asks, baffled. Max smiles, slings an arm around her.

“I keep forgetting we still haven’t cultured you enough,” she says. Then, pointing at Steve, “We need to show El the Gremlins movie tonight. It’s a classic.”

“It came out last year, how the hell is it a classic?”

“It just is. Shut up and make us breakfast,” Dustin cuts in, shoving his way into the tiny kitchen and throwing open cabinets. Robin stumbles out of his way, still sleep-mussed, and glowers as he rummages around in the pantry she organized a week ago.

“Let’s see, we’ve got cereal, oatmeal-- gross, why the hell d’you have oatmeal?-- instant hot chocolate, a box of Eggos that should be in the freezer,”

Steve sends Robin a bewildered glance, and she lunges for the pantry, grabs the Eggos, and stuffs them in the freezer before anyone else can comment on it. 

“What kind of cereal?” El asks, pushing her way next to Dustin as he keeps rattling off items that only sort of count as breakfast food. 

“There’s Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Apple Jacks--”

“What about Fruity Pebbles?” El’s on a sugary-cereal kick, and Steve, with dawning horror, has a brief flash of what chaos could ensue if she consumed not only the coffee, but also breakfast cereal that’s more sugar than grain. 

Jonathan must be thinking along the same lines, because he tugs both of them out of the pantry, much to Dustin’s protest, and informs them all that he’s making pancakes. 

“I hate pancakes,” El reminds him. 

“You’ll live.”

By the time the little shitheads have finished their breakfast (El opted for oatmeal instead of pancakes, to the other kids’ horror), it’s pouring down rain outside. The kids all migrate to the living-room floor, even though there’s a couch and an armchair that are vacant, and huddle up in a circle to talk (read: rage) about their latest AP assignment. Apparently one of their many shitty teachers (at least according to Mike, who thinks every adult he encounters is a personal threat) assigned them a three-page paper over the winter break-- the only one that’s spared from this gruesome affair is El, who’s in on-level classes; she grins as they all complain. 

In the kitchen, Steve and Robin clean up while Jonathan gets a power nap in at the table. 

While they’re washing the plates and El’s oatmeal bowl, Robin says, “I’ve been thinking about how we’re going to spend the break.”

Technically, she’s the one on break; while Robin chills before her last semester of high school, Steve’s applying to nearby colleges. She applied early action to most of her top choices, and she got each acceptance letter like clockwork in the mail before school let out. He couldn’t be prouder, but Robin’s success hasn’t distracted him from his own shit. He’s got essays to write, recommendations to compile. . . it’s a lot. And it’s all due in January. 

But instead of dragging her down with him, he says, “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, and. . . okay, so here’s the thing.” She pauses, and Steve turns to face her in the dim light. “I know you’re super stressed about college applications-- you hide it well, but I know you-- and I know you probably don’t want to be away from Dustin and his crew for too long, because it’s the holidays and all, but. . . I was thinking, y’know, since I’ll be away at college in a while and you’ll be off somewhere too, that we should go on a little road trip. Just us.”

He pauses for a minute, and soaks in the proposal. Robin’s right about the stress, and about the fact that he doesn’t want to leave the little shitheads for too long, and he really doesn’t want to think about the both of them being at different schools next year, but she’s right. She’s right and she’s his best friend, and of course he wants to go with her. Wherever she wants to go, that is. He hopes it’s somewhere sunnier than Hawkins-- the rain is falling in sheets now, and he’s losing hope of getting the kids back to Joyce’s later and off his and Robin’s hands. 

“Steve?” she asks, waving her hand in front of his face. He reaches out and bats it away, and she breaks into a grin. 

“Of course, Rob. That sounds really great, actually-- I think we both need a break from. . .” He trails off, gestures widely at all the kids in the living room. “All this.”

“Great, because I already packed a suitcase for us,” she says, still smiling, and Steve sighs and shakes his head at her and continues washing the dishes as the kids all talk over each other and Jonathan starts snoring. 

A second later, Mike and Max come bounding into the kitchen to grab armfuls of snacks from the pantry. Steve doesn’t think about the timing (and the weird pairing) until much later-- right now, washing dishes with his best friend as the rain falls in droves outside and his boyfriend sleeps through the rising cacophony of chatter from the living room, he feels blissfully content. Even as he scrapes congealed oatmeal down the drain, which is really saying something. 

\---

Three days later, Robin’s mapped out their route, Steve’s filled his car up with gas, Jonathan’s made them a mixtape for the journey, and Joyce has packed them a shit ton of snacks for the ride. They aren’t telling the kids for obvious reasons (in case Steve hasn’t made it clear that the dipshits are worryingly codependent on him, this is why-- if he or Robin mentioned a road trip to any of them, they’d beg him to let them go until he snapped and agreed, because they’re just that damn annoying), and Steve only feels slightly guilty when he ignores Dustin’s walkie talkie calls to hop in the passenger’s seat as Robin buckles her seatbelt and shoves Jonathan’s tape into the tape deck. 

Predictably, The Talking Heads blares into the car--Steve turns it down a few notches, because as much as he’s starting to appreciate their music, it’s barely eight a.m. Everything feels too loud and too bright, even though it’s overcast today and Robin’s voice is quiet. 

Despite it being early as hell, the sun still isn’t out; a blanket of slate-gray clouds covers the sky, and as they head out of town to the sound of “The Big Country”, Steve begins to feel more cozy than depressed by the weather; it reminds him of those first couple of days he and Robin spent in the Byers’ house after Rob got kicked out, or the stormy afternoons he spent with the kids at the local arcade, grinning as Max beat everyone at Dig Dug and El controlled the ticket machine with her mind. Or the day he and Nance and Robin all baked cookies in the Wheelers’ kitchen while Jonathan tried to explain logarithms to Will in the living room and the rest of the kids argued about tangent lines and the quadratic formula, even though none of them remembered it right. 

“Whatcha thinkin’ about, Dingus?” Robin asks in the floaty voice she uses when she’s driving-- she gets in this headspace where she’s only half-focused on whatever conversation she’s having because she’s concentrating so hard. Steve would have driven them, but they agreed that since Robin’s more of an early bird after she’s had caffeine, she could drive them there and he could drive them back a couple of days later, when they could wait until the afternoon to leave. Steve still doesn’t know exactly where they’re going, and at this point he’s a little afraid to ask. 

“Just. . . stuff.” It starts to rain, and “Thirteen” by Big Star floats through the car. 

“Riveting.”

“You know me, just full of deep, thought-provoking insight,” Steve says, and Robin laughs her wheezy early-morning laugh and he feels like he might fall asleep. It really is early. 

“Go to sleep, idiot.”

An hour and a string of bad alternative songs later (sorry Jonathan), Steve’s awake and Robin’s hungry. They stop at a little diner they’ve never heard of before and sit in one of the sticky booths. It’s one of those old-timey fifties’ diner places, all decked out with a checkerboard floor and cushy teal seats. There are jukeboxes in each corner, and Robin skips over to one, feeds it a couple of quarters, and chooses a Frank Sinatra song, beckoning Steve up to dance with her even though it’s some cheesy love song-- “You Make Me Feel So Young”, he realizes. 

The place is empty save for the two of them and a waitress and, Steve guesses, a cook or two in the back, so he begrudgingly hops out of his seat and joins Robin on the makeshift dance floor. She mouths the lyrics to the song by way of greeting, grinning like an idiot. 

He laughs, half-shouts their order to the waitress as Robin twirls him around. The music’s soft, kind of static-y, and for a second he really feels like they’ve gone through a time warp like Marty McFly. He almost slips as he whirls around; the floor is sticky with Coke or Pepsi, he doesn’t know which. They spin around and laugh and waltz, at Rob’s insistence, and finally collapse back in the booth as the song fades, out of breath. Right on cue, the waitress sets down two burgers and an order of fries in front of them. 

“You two are such a cute couple,” she coos, smiling this weird old-lady smile at them-- she’s in her early sixties, maybe, and she’s got her hair combed up in this weird fluffy updo that Steve almost laughs out loud at. 

“Oh, we’re not--”

Robin kicks him hard under the table, and he winces. “We’re in love,” she says dreamily, gazing at him across the table, and the waitress smiles again, satisfied, and totters off to take a newly-arrived customer’s order. Once she’s out of sight, Steve looks incredulously at Robin, who snorts out a laugh. 

“What the fuck, Rob?”

“It’s easier to just lie,” she explains, waving him off when he starts to protest. “If we say we aren’t together, there’ll be that awkward ‘well-you-should-be’ conversation and then we’ll have to justify why we aren’t. . . it just makes it less of a Thing to lie and say we are.”

He guesses she’s right, because Robin’s right about most things. And if Nance were here, she’d probably agree, and Nancy’s right about everything. 

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

She grins at him. “Because I’m right about everything.”

He kicks her under the table as payback for earlier, and she chucks a fry at him. He ducks, and it lands in his hair, and then it’s on: he throws the lettuce from his burger at her, because he hates lettuce, and she gasps in mock-offense and throws a handful of fries at him and then he has to retaliate again, because Rob never lets anything go, and by the time they’re done eating they’re both equally greasy and Rob’s shirt is wet because Steve may have poured half of his water down it, sue him. 

They leave their money on the table and hurry out of the diner before the waitress notices the mess-- Rob tips her twenty bucks because of it, so they don’t feel too guilty-- and hop back into the car just as the sky yawns open and rain starts pummeling the roof of the car. They slam their doors shut against the storm and laugh, falling into each other, and Steve suddenly feels way more awake than he did an hour ago so they crank up the music and drive. 

As they pull back onto the highway and the diner’s fifties’ songs are replaced by the seventies’ rock on Jon’s mixtape, Steve looks over at Robin and grins. She smiles back, all soft-eyed in the grey-blue light, as “And She Was” starts blaring. Steve bobs his head to the music as the chorus kicks in, all piano and drums and synth, and Robin laughs at him even though he has killer moves and changes lanes so they can drive faster. 

They lapse into amicable silence as the song fades out, and Steve picks up one of Robin’s books that’s fallen into the floorboards. He can already tell by the title and author that it’s probably something she’s borrowed from Nancy: “Cat’s Cradle” by Vonnegut. It seems like an easy enough read-- the chapters are short enough, so, at a loss for anything else to do and too awake to sleep, he starts reading. 

Thirty minutes in, he snaps the book shut and huffs out a sigh. Robin looks over at him questioningly, turns down the music. 

“You good, weirdo?”

“No,” he says, and she laughs, throwing her head back. “Rob, I’m serious, this book is extremely fucked up--”

“That’s what you get for reading Nance’s existential satirical shit on a road trip; this is supposed to be fun.”

Steve rolls his eyes at her. “You’re always telling me I need to culture myself and read more and look where it got me: instant depression. Rob, the world as we know it-- in the book, anyway-- gets thrown into a fucking Ice Age. This Vonnegut guy is dark as hell.”

“Then stop reading it,” Robin says, like it’s that easy, and then snatches the novel from him and chucks it behind her into the backseat. Steve’s about to protest, but there’s a thud, and then--

“Ow! What the fuck?!”

Robin almost veers off the road. 

Steve whirls around, eyes scanning the back of the car. There’s a whole heap of blankets in the backseat, and said heap, upon closer inspection, is moving. There’s a flurry of frantic whispering, and Steve reaches back and yanks one of the blankets away. There’s a flash of red hair, and Max begrudgingly emerges. 

She stares, open-mouthed and pale, at Steve, then reaches for the blanket beside her and yanks it off of an irate-looking Mike.

Steve narrows his eyes. Stowaways. 

“What. The. Hell,” Robin grits out, pulling off onto the shoulder of the road and jerking Steve’s car into park. Max pales even more. 

She turns and looks at Mike, and they have some weird, telepathic conversation mainly consisting of lowering their eyebrows and jerking their heads toward Steve and Robin in varying levels of panic. Finally, they break out into alternating explanations, talking over each other in a hysterical frenzy until Robin claps her hands at them like a schoolteacher. 

Steve, despite himself, laughs.  
Then Robin flicks him in the shoulder, and he shuts up.

Max’s eyes flicker nervously between them; Robin clears her throat. 

There’s a beat of agonizing silence.

“So, we can explain,” Mike starts, looking a little pale himself. Robin nods, and he continues. “We. . . heard you guys planning this out in the kitchen last week, and we were the only ones that heard because El and Dustin were arguing about what Lucas should write his paper about, even though it’s Lucas’ decision, and Will was trying to get them both to shut up, and we were both kind of bored with essay talk so we were just. . . well, I guess it was eavesdropping-- anyway, the point is, we heard you planning the trip and we decided to figure out when you were leaving, which wasn’t hard because Steve had it circled on the calendar in your living room the next time we stayed over, and-- well, we just wanted to come. So we snuck out last night and may have hid in the bushes outside your apartment-- ow, Max, don’t kick me while I’m talking-- and snuck into your car while you were both inside getting your suitcases.”

By the time he’s done, Robin’s looking at both of the kids with this baffled, vaguely awed expression, and Steve has to hand it to them: this is some next-level shit, but he’s still confused as to why they didn’t tell the others. 

“So why is it just the two of you?” Robin asks, reading his mind like usual, and Max exhales this big sigh of relief like she was expecting them to yell or freak out or something. Steve guesses maybe she was, and he feels a guilty tug in his chest. 

“I mean, we just didn’t want Dustin stinking up the car--”

“Mike, it’s fine,” Max cuts him off. “I can tell them.”

Robin leans forward in her seat a little, and nods at her, like, ‘go ahead’.

Max takes a deep breath, shrugs Mike’s hand off her shoulder. 

“I wanted to go because I. . . because I just. I really needed to get out of Hawkins. Like, really really needed to. My step-dad. . . if I’d stayed, he would try to keep me in the house all winter break. He doesn’t like that I’m always out with the Party, and El, and he’s been threatening to cut me off for a while, and. . . I was just scared. Usually he doesn’t bother me when I’m out of the house, so I thought-- I thought if he really was going to keep me cooped up at home alone, I might as well have some fun before it happens. Mike lives closest to me, so he knows the most about my step-dad, y’know, so. . . he offered to help me. We didn’t tell the others because we knew with less people we’d have less of a chance of getting caught. We were gonna tell you, once we got there. That was the plan.”

She’s staring at the Vonnegut book, turning it over in her hands, and as the silence stretches between all of them, Max tenses. Bracing herself, Steve realizes with a swell of guilt. 

“Max, we’re not gonna let The Bastard keep you inside the whole month,” he says, trying for gentle. He’s shit at comforting people, that’s Robin’s wheelhouse, but Max relaxes a little anyway. She looks up at him, still pale. 

“Yeah, we’d break you out,” Mike says, grinning a little. She shoves him, rolling her eyes, but she’s smiling, too. Steve didn’t realize how close they’d gotten recently, but they seem almost like friends now-- it took some time and some trauma-bonding, but here they are, huddled up in Steve’s backseat, laughing away their earlier panic. 

Robin’s been quiet this whole time, but now she reaches out and places a hand over one of Max’s. “But seriously, jokes aside-- even when we get back to Hawkins, we’re not letting him control you like that.”

Max sobers a little, looks Robin straight in the eye for the first time since the conversation began. “How? He’s in charge of me, you can’t just--”

“We’ll have Joyce call him and yell at him until he lets you out,” Robin assures her, and this seems to calm Max. “He can’t argue with her. Or the chief of police.”

“You think Hopper would waste his time arguing with--”

“Oh, hell yeah he would,” Steve cuts in. “Anything Joyce cares about, Hop cares about, and what’s more, you’re his kid’s girlfriend. And besides, you’re part of the Party. He’d go to bat for you in a heartbeat, kiddo. He would for any of us.”

Mike nods, and Max, looking a little misty-eyed, sinks into his side like the fight’s drained out of her. He looks a little surprised, but puts an arm around her anyway. Robin smiles at them.

“Alright, well now that that’s settled, put on your goddamn seatbelts,” Steve says, and the kids both laugh as Robin shakes her head at them in the rearview mirror. 

“I mean, seriously, this was what, three and a half hours of driving? They’ve been back there without seatbelts for three and a half hours, Rob,” he tells her, because it’s seriously worrying to him that they didn’t notice and the kids could’ve been in mortal danger if they’d gotten into a wreck or something. Jesus, he’s starting to sound like his mother. 

Robin laughs at him as she pulls back onto the highway, and Mike asks her to turn on some better music, please, tacking on the pleasantry since the kids are on thin ice after the stunt they’ve pulled, and Robin caves and takes out Jonathan’s tape. 

Max suggests Madonna, because of course she does, and Mike throws his head back against his seat like ‘kill me now’; Robin snickers at his agony and obliges, and “Material Girl” blares through the speakers. 

“I said GOOD music--”

“Madonna IS good, you just have awful taste!”

“Shut up, Max, Crowded House isn’t awful--”

“Yes,” she says through gritted teeth “it IS.”

“Both of you shut up!” Robin exclaims. “This is the best part!”

Mike clamps his hands over his ears, the dramatic little shit. Max tries to pry them off, and he kicks her in the shin, and yeah, they’re friends now; Steve can tell. 

“Stop touching me!” Mike screeches, kicking at her again. “You’re insane-- Robin, she’s insane!”

“That’s sexist,” Robin informs him, and he gapes at her. “What? Women get called hysterical for everything and what do men get? A slap on the wrist. God Mike, you’re such a Republican.”

“Can gay people even be Republican?” Max asks, releasing Mike’s hands, which he gladly clamps back over his ears even though the song’s fading out anyway. 

Steve sighs against the window. This is going to be a long trip. 

\---

Three hours, at least seven backseat arguments, two rest stops, and a hundred Cyndi Lauper songs later, Robin cuts the music and pulls into the parking lot of a surprisingly nice hotel. 

The parking lot is dark and half-lit in the glow of the streetlamps, and for a second it doesn’t feel real, but then Robin’s shaking him and the kids awake and pulling their doors open for them, and cold air rushes in and propels them out of the car and into the warm safety of the hotel lobby. 

Inside, it’s quiet, bright overhead lights illuminating a multicolored carpet with a weird, swirling pattern that makes Steve dizzy. Robin checks them in, slides her credit card across the counter as Max and Mike doze off again on one of the leather couches near the check-in area. Steve has half a mind to do the same, but then Robin’s got him by the arm and is pulling the kids up with her free hand, dragging them all towards the elevators,

Steve tries to ignore the rush of panic when Robin presses the call button and the ding reverberates through him when the elevator arrives. Robin seems to notice, though, because she leans up close to his ear and whispers, 

“I’m sorry, I don’t know where the stairs are and it’s late. . . it’ll be okay. Just squeeze my hand the whole time.”

He feels vaguely indignant at how calm she seems, and he latches onto the annoyance as they all squish together in the cramped space with his and Rob’s suitcases. She presses the number for their floor-- six-- and smiles at the kids while the elevator starts to move, when it does that little down-then-up thing that’s always freaked Steve out but became twenty times more anxiety-inducing after Starcourt. He can feel his breathing speeding up, and it’s making his stomach turn over. The walls are so close to him that the handrail is digging into his back. He can smell Robin’s shampoo and Mike’s weird cologne-- don’t ask, the kid’s been in a phase-- from where he’s standing, and the lights above them are painting everything in this garish yellow-green wash, and thank God the lights are tinted yellow and not blue, but it’s still disorienting and makes him squeeze his eyes shut like he’s on a rollercoaster that’s veering up and readying for a drop. 

But the drop never happens, because the elevator dings again when they reach floor six, and the doors slide open, and then the kids are trudging into the hall and Rob’s following them and yanking Steve with her after he takes a minute to collect himself. 

When they get to the room and Rob slides the key into the lock, he sees that her hands are shaking. 

If the kids notice, they don't say anything. 

\---

The next morning, Steve is being shaken awake by two equally-annoying children, both of which are yelling incomprehensibly over each other about breakfast. 

He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. This trip was supposed to be relaxing, dammit. 

“Get UP, Steve!” Mike yells, laughing when Max yanks him to his feet. He stumbles, still only half-awake, and almost careens into Robin, who’s somehow already dressed in loose-fitting jeans and a hoodie that looks like one of Nancy’s. She’s got her arms crossed, and she’s glaring. Steve can’t tell if it’s in a joking way or not. 

“Get up, Dingus,” she says, even though he’s literally just been dragged out of bed, “we have to be downstairs in five minutes if we want the hotel breakfast. They have banana-nut muffins.”

“Muffins, Steve!” Max stresses as he waves the kids out of his personal space and heads for the bathroom, shutting the door in their faces. “I haven’t had muffins in years!”

Mike scoffs. “That is such a lie.”

“Is not,” Max retorts, and Steve hears what sounds like one of them pushing the other, followed by Robin’s laugh. He rolls his eyes even though they can’t see it and tries to make his hair look presentable. It’s lost some of it’s signature Harrington fluff due to the car ride and the weird hotel pillows he slept on, but he’ll just have to live with it. The things he does for Robin. . . 

“Is so, we had chocolate-chip ones at Will’s two weekends ago,” Mike is saying, and Steve can hear the smirk in the kid’s voice. 

“No, YOU had muffins at Will’s; I had an Eggo Extravaganza with El. She didn’t want to be the only one eating one.”

“Well, you missed out--”

“I KNOW, which is why we need Steve to HURRY UP,” Max retorts, banging on the bathroom door to emphasize her point. Steve sighs as he pulls on the sweatshirt and jeans Robin laid out for him on the bathroom counter. 

“I’m going as fast as I can, idiots.”

“He’s probably messing with his hair,” Mike grumbles. 

“Alright, that’s it,” Robin says. “Steve, I’m taking them downstairs. We’ll bring you back a muffin and a coffee.”

“YES!” Max yells, and Steve resists the urge to bang his forehead against the wall. They just got him up for nothing. 

“Bye, Dingus!” Robin shouts, and the muffled thud of the entryway door shutting leaves Steve alone in the room. 

He sighs again even though no one’s there to hear it, runs his fingers through his hair in the mirror one last time (screw you, Mike), and plops down on his bed again, grabbing one of the books Robin’s already got laying on the bedside table and flipping through it absently. 

He doesn’t know what she has planned for today, but by the looks of it they’re probably in Indianapolis. Much bigger and a little busier than Hawkins, sunnier too. Maybe they’ll hit up a museum or two, visit a cafe or an art exhibit. He left the planning to Robin, really, because he’s shit at sticking to his ideas and sucks at anything involving organization. Once, he’d partnered up with Nance for a bio project in junior year (she was in his class even though she was a sophomore, because she’s Nancy) and she’d left a portion of the work to him, but he’d lost the rubric and completely forgotten about it and she’d had to rush through completing it in the car before the bell rang. 

And Nancy, being Nancy, never let him hear the end of it, so Steve isn’t in charge of organizing or planning anything ever, because that’s fair. 

He’s still kind of in this stupid thought spiral when the door swings open and Max, Mike, and Rob all parade inside, laughing about something he missed out on. Mike andMax are carrying paper bags filled with what Steve assumes are the muffins, and Robin’s got a coffee in each hand. 

“Hey, dipshits,” Steve says, catching the paper bag Max tosses at him. 

“Hey, Dingus,” Robin greets, setting his coffee down on the side table and sipping her own with a vaguely detached expression. Mike seems to notice, and nudges Max; they share this weird, knowing look, Robin still zoned-out, and start giggling, and okay, Steve wants in on whatever this is right now. 

“Hey, earth to Rob,” he says, waving a hand in front of her face. She blinks rapidly, like she’s waking up from a dream, and the kids just laugh harder. 

“Robin saw a pretty girl in the lobby!” Max sing-songs, and Rob’s face reddens like it does when she’s caught off-guard. 

“I-- she wasn’t THAT pretty, and-- and I’m dating Nancy!”

“Gross,” Mike mutters. 

“Well, I am. And-- this isn’t relevant to anything we’ve got planned for today, let’s just drop it.”

“No, no, I wanna know what happened,” Steve presses, smiling innocently at Robin as she glares daggers at him. He knows she’s, like, practically in love with Nance, he just wants to see her squirm. 

“When we got to the breakfast buffet, there was a girl in front of the muffin platter, and Max went up to her to ask her to move, because she’s Max, and the girl turned around and Robin CHOKED on her COFFEE--” Mike says, cutting himself off with a laugh.

Robin rolls her eyes at him. 

“She just-- her face. . . surprised me,” she says, trailing off at the end, which just makes the kids start laughing again, and Steve sighs and pulls Robin down on the bed next to him, like, ‘it’s okay, gay panic is a universal experience.’ She sits down beside him begrudgingly, crossing her arms while Max gets her shit together. 

“There’s more, though,” she says, hitting Mike on the shoulder to shut him up. They hold each other’s gaze for a split second, all barely-contained hilarity dancing in their eyes, and he kicks her in the shin in retaliation. She doesn’t even flinch, barreling on while Mike rubs his shoulder like a wounded animal. 

“So while she was choking, Mike and I got all the muffins-- like, all of them, because they looked incredible, like better than Dustin’s mom’s baking-- and Lobby Girl noticed that Robin was dying and tried to help her by getting her some water, and Robin literally looked like she’d just seen an ANGEL--”

“She was staring SO INTENSELY,” Mike says, and they break into laughter again, so loud this time that it seems to fill the whole room up with warmth, and Robin’s expression softens as she watches them fall into each other, hysterical. 

Steve thinks they look a little bit like a mirror of him and Robin, all wheezing and wiping each other’s tears and shit. They’re shoving each other, falling back onto the other bed, still laughing, and he decides they’re definitely a Steve-and-Robin mirror. Not in the literal sense, but. . . Nancy would know the word. In a symbolic sense. Yeah, they look like that. Parallels, Jonathan would say. 

Max is the kind of kid that can’t stop laughing once she starts, and Mike is the kind of kid that can’t stop laughing when one of his friends is losing their shit, so they’re caught in this cycle of trying to compose themselves but completely breaking when one of them looks at the other, and Robin sighs and shakes her head, like, ‘What can you do?’ and asks if she can try Steve’s coffee since he always drinks it black and she pours, like, a whole ocean of creamer into hers. 

“Rob, you ask me this every time we get coffee, and EVERY time you hate it--”

“Steve! I’m a new woman now,” she says, making grabby hands at his coffee, and he bites back a laugh when she lunges for it and misses. “I’m serious! I think I’ll like it this time.”

Steve sighs and relents, because it’s Robin, and her whole face brightens when he hands it over. Max and Mike have pulled themselves into sitting positions on the bed opposite them, their feet dangling above the floor, and they’ve forgone their giddiness to focus on more pressing matters, like eating all the muffins they’ve crammed into the paper bag Mike kept for them. They’re getting crumbs everywhere, and Steve feels a pang of guilt when he pictures housekeeping shaking muffin remains out of the sheets, but the dipshits are oblivious, and he doesn’t want to sour the morning with a Mom Steve Tirade. 

When Robin’s done pulling faces and trying to look like she’s enjoying Steve’s coffee and the kids are done with their breakfast, Steve claps his hands twice like he’s Hopper and says, “Alright, idiots. Where are we off to first?”

The kids stare expectantly at Robin, and she sets Steve’s coffee cup on the night table, brushes muffin crumbs off her sweatshirt, and rummages around in her bag until she finds a single loose-leaf sheet of paper. 

Unfurling it dramatically, she stands and says, “First on the docket is a downtown art exhibit! They open at eight, and it’s seven forty-five, so if we leave now on foot we’ll be there in time to see everything early.”

Max grins and fishes for something in her own bag as Mike and Steve head for the door. She pulls out a camera that looks suspiciously like one of Jonathan’s and bounds over to the rest of them, and they’re off. 

When they’d gone to get breakfast, Robin had asked someone in the lobby where the stairs were, and she leads Steve and the kids down the hall and to the flights of stairs, laughing when Mike trips because he’s trying to take them two at a time, the idiot. 

“You can’t take them two at a time when you’re walking DOWN them, dumbass,” Max snarks. 

“Well, now I’m just going to take that as a challenge,” Mike retorts, grabbing her wrist when he nearly falls again. She stumbles and catches herself on the handrail, glowering at him as he snickers. 

It’s like this the whole way down, and when they finally reach the first floor, Steve almost misses the chaos of the car ride to the hotel-- sure, the kids wouldn’t stop arguing about stupid shit like I Spy and road sign games, but at least then Steve could turn up the radio or watch rain drops race down his smudged window, tuning them out. 

Outside, though, the kids quiet down as Robin adopts a tour guide-esque voice and narrates their surroundings in vivid detail, even though Indianapolis isn’t exactly a novelty of a city. She goes from pointing out restaurants and quirky cafes and bakeries to describing the people around them, which makes Max and Mike lose their collective shit and earns Rob a couple of dirty looks. 

Robin’s sipping her second coffee, this time with cream and sugar, only half-paying attention to their route, but the walk to the art exhibit seems short enough, so it’s not like it really matters. They’ll find it.

“And if you look to your right, perhaps you’ll be unfortunate enough to--”

“‘Perhaps’? What is this, the fifties?” Max interjects, squinting at Robin through snow-covered eyelashes. Mike snickers beside her. 

Robin rolls her eyes dramatically, slowing her pace to account for the interruption. “I SAID, if you look to your right, PERHAPS you’ll be unfortunate enough to catch sight of the city’s most haunting, gruesome inhabitant!” 

She gestures grandly at a sharp-nosed woman who’s yelling at her kid a couple of feet away; the boy is shrinking away from her, hugging himself protectively, and the sight makes something hot and angry rush up in Steve’s chest. 

Mike is glaring at the woman, too, and he stops in his tracks so suddenly that Steve almost runs into him. The woman’s so absorbed in her lecture that she doesn’t take notice of the kid until he’s right in front of her. 

Shit, shit, shit. 

“Hey, lady,” he grits out, “It’s really bitchy to scream at your own kid in public.”

Steve’s dragged Robin and Max along with him after Mike, and they reach him just as the woman’s face twists into an even more pronounced scowl. 

“I don’t know who you think you are, but the way I discipline my son is MY business--”

“Not if you’re shouting at him in broad daylight,” Mike cuts her off, and Steve feels a swell of pride that’s quickly followed by terror, because how are they going to get out of this? 

“You MAKE it everyone’s business when you’re clearly being abusive in front of passerby,” Mike’s barrelling on, rolling his eyes when her face reddens in anger, and Robin finally seems to break out of whatever trance they’re all stuck in and shoves herself between the woman and Mike, her face a mask of indifference. 

“Look, I’m sorry about my strange little child friend,” she says, sounding Not Sorry At All, “we’re kind of in a rush here, but I’ll leave you with this: don’t yell at your kid like that, or he might end up like me.” 

And then she pours her half-full cup of coffee over the woman’s head. Her kid tries to hide a laugh behind his hand. 

On pure instinct, Steve grabs Mike and Max by their shirt collars and runs, Robin chasing after them, laughing into the open air like she’s on drugs or some shit, and when they’re a safe distance away, Steve skids to a half, turning and glaring at Robin while the kids lose it. 

“What the hell?”

“She was a monster, Steve--”

“Yeah, you don’t poke a bear with a stick, Rob,” he says, suddenly worried about what that woman’s kid is going to have to deal with for the rest of the day. 

She sighs, deflating a little, and he thinks she understands, then, because she turns to the kids and says, “Okay, let’s just. . . forget that happened. Look, the exhibit’s right up here.”

As they follow Robin to a big building that looks like a theatre, Steve sees Mike grab Max’s hand. She looks at him questioningly, but doesn’t pull away, and they stay like that until they enter the exhibit and suddenly they’re surrounded by canvas after canvas mounted to the wall, and Max needs both hands free to snap pictures.

Steve trails after Robin as she looks at all the art, squinting and tilting his head at each piece like he’ll find meaning in the paint splotches if he just changes his perspective. He’s never been creative like Robin, or quietly poetic like Jonathan, or had Nancy’s curios, observational eye, and for most of his life, art and its complexity has eluded him. Rob’s into all the abstract shit, which just makes things even more confusing. If you’re painting a person, why would you want them to look like some sort of deconstructed science project? Steve doesn’t get it. 

Which is how he finds himself beside Max, staring at a hyper-realistic painting of a young girl, her face awash in this bruise-blue lighting, looking off into nothingness like she’s in a dream. The title card reads, “A Girl, Caged.”

He’s only just walked up, but she’s been standing in front of it for minutes, like it’s a mirror and she’s picking apart her own reflection. He hopes that isn’t how she sees it. 

“Huh,” Steve says after a minute stretches between them. He feels his chest constrict, jumps a little when Max’s camera shutter clicks. He doesn’t know if she’s allowed to take photos in here. 

“Pretty creepy,” she remarks brightly, and he feels relief flood through him. Max doesn’t feel like the girl in the painting, how could she? He knows her home life is shit, but she isn’t trapped, and she knows that, and--

“Creepier when you notice this, though,” she adds, tracing a shadow he hadn’t noticed before. It sprawls across the right side of the canvas, enveloping a small corner of the girl’s face in darkness; Max’s fingernail outlines the full shape of the smear, and Steve’s breath catches when he sees it: a man. 

“He’s in front of her, that’s why his shadow’s there,” Max says, her voice still bright despite the fact that to Steve, the room’s gotten ten shades darker. How can she see this and not see herself? How can she see this and take photo after photo? 

She’s still snapping pictures when Robin and Mike walk over to them, zooming in to capture how the greens and blues and grays mix together to shape the girl’s jawline, how they mottle beneath her eyes to create dark circles that could rival Will’s, how they wash half of the girl’s face in murky, muddy shadow. 

“Jesus, that’s bleak,” Mike says, and he grabs Max by the hand and leads her over to a brighter piece. Steve watches them go, watches Max’s face light up at this painting of two ginger-furred kittens curled up on a bright red sofa; watches Mike smile and grab the camera, snapping a picture of Max posing with the print, her eyes shining under the blinding exhibit lights. 

He tugs his gaze away when he feels a hand on his shoulder: Robin. 

“You okay, idiot?” she asks, her voice soft so the kids can’t hear. There’s snow melting in her hair.

“Yeah,” he says too quickly, nodding even as Robin’s face falls. He wishes, for today, at least, that she couldn’t read him so damn well. 

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I. . . I just. She was going nuts over this piece,” Steve says weakly, gesturing vaguely at the painting in front of them.

“It’s beautiful,” Robin says quietly. 

“But sad, too,” he says, pointing at the shadow-man. “She noticed this right off the bat. She. . . Rob, we have to help Max.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” she tells him, and he knows from the strain in her voice that she’s worried about this, too, that she cares; he remembers the look on her face in the car when Max had told them about The Bastard, the way her eyes had welled up. “We’re not her parents. Joyce isn’t her mom. She’s a tough kid, okay? All we can do is be there for her as much as possible.”

“I know, it’s just. . .” He trails off, but not because he’s at a loss for words or because he’s too chagrined to continue. In the haze of road trip excitement and diner food and hotel breakfasts, Steve forgot about Joyce. Forgot about Joyce and her tendency to blow everything out of proportion (even if she was right about the alternate-dimension shit), and Will’s tendency to tell her everything, like, oh, Steve doesn’t know, maybe the fact that his friends have gone mysteriously missing? Shit. Shitshitshit. 

She’s probably tearing the town apart as they speak.

“Steve?” Robin’s saying, concern leaking into her voice, but he’s running now, grabbing the shitheads by the hand and racing out the exhibit door with Robin trailing after them, cursing. 

They’ll look back on this and laugh, Steve knows, but right now he’s panicking, because Joyce is going to rip his head off for not calling sooner, and The Party’s probably instituted a Code Red and mounted their stupid bikes to search for their missing Comrades (Dustin’s words, not his-- they’ve started using weird Communist jargon with each other as a running joke, typical dipshit behavior), and El and Will are probably heartbroken, and--

By the time they reach the hotel room and Robin’s wordlessly unlocked the door and Steve’s caught his damn breath, because he sprinted all the way here with two kids slowing him down, he feels like he could collapse any minute, but thankfully he’s still lucid enough to remember the Byers’ home phone number. 

She picks up on the first ring. 

“Hello? Who is this?”

“Hi, Joyce,” Steve says weakly, glaring at Mike when realization dawns on his face and he barks out a laugh. 

“Oh, Steve, thank God-- I’ve been trying to reach you, I think you’re going to need to come back home. Honey, Mike and Max are missing.”

Steve blows out a breath, pinches the bridge of his nose. “About that. . . yeah, they stowed away in my car, so. They’re. . . y’know, they’re fine. All in one piece. We should’ve called sooner, and I’m so sorry, I just. . . we were all really tired, and--”

“Oh, thank God,” Joyce says over him, and Steve thinks he can hear El and Will asking her what’s going on. He can picture them now, both huddled up on her couch after a day of riding around in the snow looking for Max and Mike, and he almost asks Joyce if he can talk to them, but then Max lunges for the phone and beats him to it. 

“Ms. Byers, is El there?” she asks, and Steve hears Joyce laugh this relieved, wild laugh, and he sighs and feels the fight-or-flight instinct drain out of him. She’s not mad. She’s not mad at him. 

“Hi, El! Yes, it’s really me-- well, you could’ve found me in the void,” Max is saying, all soft eyed even though El isn’t even in the room. 

“I TRIED THAT!” El yells, and Max flinches away from the receiver, laughing. 

“Hey, El, you don’t have to shout,” Mike reminds her. “We can hear you fine.”

El still doesn’t really get how phones work. 

“Mike?” Will’s voice spills through, ecstatic, and Robin pulls Steve down beside her on the bed closest to the window. She sighs and sinks into his side, and he feels a pang of guilt swell up in him for dragging all of them here at freaking warp speed.

“Will!” Mike says, his face brightening. “I miss you so much, I’m so sorry we freaked you out!”

“We thought the gate had opened again,” El says, and Mike shakes his head rapidly like they can see him. Robin laughs quietly, and Steve feels it vibrate through him. 

“No no no, everything’s fine, we’re okay,” he assures her, his voice going all gentle, and Max looks at him like she’s seeing him for the first time. “Do Dustin and Lucas know? Are they with you right now?”

“Hop made them go home,” Will says. “Told them if the gate was open again, they would be safest with their families. I can Walkie them and let them know, though.”

“Yeah, do that,” Max says, and there’s a rustling on the other end like Will’s handing the phone to El.

“We miss you,” she says in her I’m-a-million-decades-old voice, all seriousness tinged with affection. “Come home soon, please.”

Steve thinks he sees tears in Max’s eyes, or maybe it’s just the light. The lamp is casting this dim yellow glow over all of them, painting them in warm tones that stick out against the blue light sweeping in from the window; outside, the sky has grayed over, but it’s tinted indigo-blue, and the snow is falling in twinkling flurries. 

“We will, I promise. I’ve got a ton of pictures to show you. Mike’s making this really dumb face in a bunch of them--”

“Hey!” Mike interjects, making a grab for the phone. Max jumps up on the bed across from Steve and Robin, holding it out of his reach, and he laughs despite himself. 

“Yeah, he looks like a real idiot-- oh, hi Ms. Byers,” she says, jumping down from the bed and shoving the phone towards Steve. “She wants to talk to you again.”

Steve swallows, reminds himself she’s not pissed at him. “Hey, Joyce.”

“Hi, honey. Listen, I know you and Robin were super excited for this trip, but. . . well, Mrs. Wheeler’s been insistent that Mike needs to come home as soon as possible, and I haven’t spoken to the Mayfields, but I’m sure they’re worried about Max, too. You guys can stay the night, but. . . I think it’s best for everyone if you’re back by tomorrow, honey.”

“Of course, Joyce. There’s actually not a lot to do here, anyway. We’ll be back as soon as possible. Again, I’m so sorry about the mix-up--”

“Steve. It’s okay,” she says, all warm sincerity, and he feels something in him loosen and lighten. “Go find a cool restaurant to have dinner at, and call us before you leave tomorrow, okay?”

“You got it,” Steve assures her, and then there’s the click of her hanging up, and they’re enveloped in quiet for about three seconds. 

“So where are we eating dinner?” Mike asks. Max throws a pillow at him. 

\---

After a dinner of create-your-own pizza at a local pizzeria, a two-hour long back-to-back Dracula/Frankenstien TV special, and a thirty-minute game of Would You Rather that ends in Max declaring herself winner even though, as Mike points out, Would You Rather isn’t a game you can win or lose at, the kids are asleep (finally) and Steve is trying to prepare himself for the six-hour drive he’s going to make tomorrow. 

The room is dark and still save for the moonlight slanting in through the cracks in the curtains, and Steve has almost been lulled to sleep by the ticking of the clock on the night table and Robin’s steady, slow breathing beside him when there’s a pained gasp from across the room and Mike jolts awake. 

“Shit,” he breathes, running a hand through his matted hair, and Max stirs beside him. The bed’s a queen, big enough for both of them to have their own space, but Steve remembers El mentioning how light of a sleeper she is in passing. 

Steve frowns, stretching towards the lamp beside their beds and flicking it on. Mike squints as his eyes adjust to the light, Max brushing her hair out of her eyes. 

“What’s going on?” she asks groggily. Robin smushes her face further into her pillow, still asleep and blissfully unaware of the way Mike’ breathing is coming in ragged pants, speeding up even though he’s escaped whatever nightmare he had. Steve shifts in bed and sits up fully, waiting for the kid to say something. 

“You okay, Mike?” Max asks, putting a hand on his shoulder. He flinches, and she retracts it immediately, eyes searching his face. Steve peers at both of them like he’ll find the answers in their body language. Mike’s hunched over, curled in on himself, Max leaning towards him while still keeping her distance. 

“Mike, buddy, are you alright?” Steve says, finally finding his voice. He feels like he’s talking to a wall.

“I. . . yeah, I’m fine, it’s fine,” Mike sputters, blinking fast like he’s clearing a fog. “Just. . . go back to sleep, Turn off the light.”

“Mike,” Max says, quiet and knowing. “You’ll feel better if you talk about it.”

“It. . . it was all of you,” he says weakly, staring at his hands. “It got all of you. The Mind-Flayer, I mean. Sometimes I just dream about Will, or El, but this time. . . it got all of you.”

Max’s expression softens, smooths itself over, and she tells him, “The gate’s closed. For good this time. We’re all okay, and tomorrow we’ll be back home, and you’ll get to see Will and El and the rest of The Party. . . hey, Mike, look at me.”

He does, and Steve feels something catch in his chest. 

“We’re not going to leave you, okay?”

“Okay,” he chokes out, and she opens her arms, and he rolls his eyes at her because even scared and crying in a musty hotel room at three in the morning, he’s still Mike, but he hugs her too and Steve feels a wave of calm wash over him. The kids are okay. They have nightmares and panic attacks and years of trauma to sort through, but they also have each other. 

And they have him. 

“Hey, guys?” Steve says, and they both pull apart and look at him like they forgot he was awake. “No more sugar before bed, got that?”

Mike smiles his stupid half-smile, and Max huffs a quiet laugh, and they look at each other and nod in agreement. 

Steve stands and crosses the short distance to their bed, ruffles Mike’s hair, and switches the lamp off again, nearly stumbling and falling on his ass when he underestimates the distance to his own bed. Mike laughs, for real this time, and Robin’s eyes squint open in a glare that makes Steve start laughing, too, and then Max and Mike are caught in their stupid uncontrollable cycle of giddiness again, only this time they’re sleep-deprived so it’s much worse, and by the time they’re all asleep again it’s nearly four thirty. 

The next morning, there’s a crick in Steve’s neck and his left arm is sore from sleeping on it all weird, but he finds that, all things considered, he really doesn’t care. 

It takes him and Robin about an hour to call Joyce to tell her they’re coming home, wake the shitheads up, pack everything back into their bags, and race downstairs to shovel breakfast in their mouths (cold coffee and dry cereal) before they turn their room keys in on time and hit the road. Steve’s driving this time despite the pain in his arm, which leaves Rob in total control of the music selection. 

It’s Mike’s worst nightmare. 

On the fifth Madonna song of the drive (it’s been twenty minutes), he rolls down his window, unbuckles his seatbelt and says, “I’ll jump out if you don’t change it!”

“Mike Wheeler, we’re on the highway!” Robin shouts, twisting in her seat to chuck a balled-up fast food napkin at him. He dodges it and glares at her, aghast. 

“I can’t help that I have better taste than everyone else in this car!”

“WHOA whoa whoa,” Steve interjects, glaring at him in the rearview mirror, “For the record, I have impeccable taste.”

“No, you just let Jonathon indoctrinate you into his weird edgy music elitist cult,” Max says. “Robin, turn up the music!”

“Where’s The Party” blares through the car, and Max scream-sings the chorus while Mike lunges for the radio. Steve knocks him back into his seat with his elbow. 

“Wheeler. Seatbelt.”

Mike glowers at him, sitting motionless-- and seatbelt-less-- in his seat, arms crossed belligerently. Steve puts Robin’s hands on the wheel and turns around to stare the kid down. 

“Mike, put your seatbelt on or SO HELP ME GOD--”

Max reaches over and does it for him, and he glares at her. She just grins and sings louder. 

Steve turns back towards the road and grabs the wheel, and Robin leans back in her seat, returning to her book. It’s not Vonnegut, thank God-- it’s a hardcover, something about a Handmaid-- and she’s totally absorbed in it. He makes a mental note to borrow it when his classes are slow. 

Classes. College. His stomach sinks with the unique kind of dread that can only accompany the college admissions process, but he pushes the thoughts from his mind and focuses instead on the road, the cars whizzing by, the map Robin’s taped to the dash in front of her so he can easily look over at it and back at the route he’s taking.

Eventually, Mike falls victim to Madonna’s mystic spell, and by the time they’ve gotten diner burgers and hit the road again, he’s singing along to “Love Makes The World Go Round”, bobbing his head while Max does freestyle dance moves and lip syncs along with the song. 

Outside, the sky has darkened to a steel blue, and by the time Steve’s pulled into the Wheeler’s neighborhood, it’s pitch black, lit up by streetlamps and the moonlight mottling their path through the bare trees above them. 

When he pulls into Mike’s driveway, Robin cuts off the music, and Max pulls Mike into a hug. They whisper something to each other, but Steve can’t hear it. Maybe he shouldn't be trying to. 

When the kid gets out of the car, he knocks on Steve’s window. “Walk me to the porch,” he says, and Steve and Robin hop out and follow the glow of the Wheeler’s porch lights to their front door. Steve rings the bell, and the door swings open to reveal--

“Nancy!” Mike yells, and she pulls him into a hug. “I thought you were in New York!”

“Well, I was,” she says, her voice muffled by his sweater, “until Mom called and told me you were missing.” She pulls back, her eyes searching his face. “Mike, what the hell were you thinking?”

He sighs, and even though he’s almost as tall as Nancy now, he looks decades younger in the dark. Steve remembers how small he looked just the night before, curled like a comma in that giant hotel room, and blinks until he’s rooted in the present again, on Nancy’s doorstep, in the bitter cold under warm porch lights and the full moon. 

“I’ll explain later. How long are you staying?”

“Well,” Nancy sighs, and in that split-second she meets Robin’s eyes and they have a Nancy-and-Robin Telepathy Moment, “I guess until New Year’s?”

“Yes!” Mike shouts, and then seems to remember how old he is. “I mean, that’s great. That’s cool.”

Robin laughs and ruffles his hair, and Nancy meets her eyes again, and Steve looks pointedly at his shoes, because hey, since when did he own red shoelaces? And Mike says,”You guys can kiss. I’m going to my room.”

Robin huffs out a laugh, and Nancy steps out onto the porch so Mike can trudge inside, and then they’re hugging, and Robin says, “I missed you,” so quietly Steve can barely hear it. 

“I missed you, too,” Nancy says through a laugh, standing on her tiptoes to peck Robin on the cheek. “Wanna come over tomorrow? The Party has a big winter break AP project to do, and they were planning on doing it here. Jonathan’s driving Will over, I think, and Steve can come,” she says, smiling at him in the dim light. 

He grins back at her. Her hair’s different again, cut in a pixie style that reaches the nape of her neck in the back and skims the tips of her ears on the sides. Her bangs are shorter, too, Audrey Hepburn-style. She looks a little bit like a fairy. 

“Sounds like a plan, Nance,” he says, and then, “Well, Max is probably getting cold, so. . .”

“Right! Of course,” Nancy says, shaking her head at herself. She hugs Robin one last time, pats Steve on the back, and slips back inside through the front door. 

Steve sees Mike’s light flick on upstairs, and then Robin’s pulling him back towards the car. In the flash of the headlights, he can see her blushing. 

\---

They decide to take Max to the Byers’. 

When they get back in the car, she’s dead asleep, her face pressed against the cold window, her knees pulled up to her chest, and Robin looks at her and then back at Steve, and he pulls out of the Wheeler’s neighborhood and onto the road that leads to the Byers’ side of town. 

Outside, the whole town is going to sleep: the roads are abandoned, winding through stretches of skeletal trees and by houses with all their lights off. Hawkins blurs into a plum-colored haze, whizzing by as fast as time does. By the time he pulls into the Byers’ neighborhood, Steve’s tired enough to sleep in the car. 

The porch light is on, like always, and he squints as the front door swings open before Robin’s even shaken Max awake. Steve steps out into the cold and squints at the figure on the porch. They wave, and he smiles nito the freezing air, dragging Robin and a groggy, half-awake Max to the front door. 

“Took you long enough,” Jonathan says, pulling Steve into a hug. He melts into the embrace, inhaling Jonathan's clean, woodsy scent, and almost passes out then and there. Robin rubs his shoulder comfortingly.

“He drove the whole way here,” she says quietly. “Can Max stay the night? She. . . we didn’t want to bother her parents this late at night.”

“Of course,” Jonathan murmurs, tightening his hold on Steve, who’s finding it harder and harder to keep his eyes open. “Here, come in-- it’s freezing as shit out here. Fair warning, though, all the kids are--”

The door swings all the way open, and Dustin grins toothily up at them. Behind him, Lucas and Will jump up from the couch and rush over, a tired-looking El close behind. 

“Inside,” Jonathan finishes lamely, ruffling Dustin’s curls as he shoves his way past the kids, dragging Steve with him. 

“Henderson,” Steve mumbles by way of sleep-deprived greeting, and Dustin cracks up. 

“Steve, you look DEAD, man--”

“Shut up,” Steve says. Jonathan kisses him on the forehead. 

Robin follows them in, Max hanging on to her wrist like a toddler, all squinty-eyed and barely lucid. El’s face lights up when she sees her, and she rushes forward and envelopes her in a hug. Max sinks into her, sighing sleepily. 

“Where’s Mike?” Will asks, and Max rolls her eyes. Even half-asleep, she’s snarky. 

“At’is house,” she slurs groggily, flopping down on the Byers’ living room couch and pulling El with her. Jonathan guides Steve to an armchair and drapes one of Joyce’s knitted blankets over him, then turns to the rest of the kids, arms crossed. 

“Alright guys, Nancy says you need to be at the Wheeler’s house tomorrow to do some project, is that right?”

Lucas and Dustin groan dramatically in unison, and Will nods gravely. 

“Forgot about that,” El says defeatedly, stroking Max’s hair. She’s got her head on a pillow resting on El’s lap, and she’s out cold. 

“Dammit,” Dustin grumbles. “Who assigns a school project on WINTER BREAK--”

“Dustin, no yelling,” El admonishes. Henderson shuts up. 

“So my point is,” Jonathan cuts in, “You all need to take some notes from Max and go the hell to sleep. Borrow some more blankets and sleep on the floor for all I care, just. . . I’m not supervising a bunch of angry, sleep-deprived Gremlins tomorrow, okay?”

Lucas salutes him, and Dustin sighs and tugs about a million blankets from one of the baskets by the TV, and Jonathan drags Will down the hall, and once all the dipshits are settled, Dustin and Lucas on the floor and El and Max on the couch and Rob in the other armchair across the room, Steve lets himself give in to the pull of sleep. 

The next morning, he wakes up to what sounds like a massacre. 

“OH my GOD, Lucas,” Dustin’s screaming, yanking Steve’s pillow from behind his head and chucking it at Lucas’ face. “What the hell?!”

“I didn’t MEAN TO,” Lucas yells even louder, waking Max, who glares daggers at him and launches her own pillow at his head, hitting him again. 

“What’s happening?” El asks, squinting at all of them. Lucas is staring at Dustin with fear in his eyes, both of his hands up in surrender, and Dustin’s glaring at him like he’s just confessed to killing a man. 

“LUCAS decided it would be a WONDERFUL idea to wake me up by FARTING,” Dustin hisses venomously, and Lucas’ expression twists into one of indignant anger. 

“I didn’t DECIDE to, it wasn’t a choice!” 

“It’s always a choice, Lucas!”

“I didn’t--”

“IT’S ALWAYS A CHOICE!”

El blinks at them. “What time is it?”

Dustin checks his wristwatch, because of course he has a wristwatch: “Eight in the morning.”

“Nope, too early,” El informs them, pulling her blanket back over her head. She likes to sleep in a cocoon of pillows and blankets, and Steve would worry about her oxygen levels if the kid didn’t have actual superpowers. 

“Actually, El, we’re supposed to be at Mike’s at, like, nine,” Max says, and, as if on cue, Will trudges into the living room, bright-eyed despite his late bedtime. 

“Guys, Jonathan’s in the shower but he says we have to be ready by eight thirty.”

“Fucking hell,” Dustin mutters. 

“Language, Henderson,” Steve snaps, and the kid turns to him with his mouth hanging open like he’d forgotten Steve was there. 

Behind him, Lucas snickers and heads for the hall bathroom. 

“Morning, Steve,” Dustin says. “Forgot you were here.”

“Go brush your teeth, shithead.”

Dustin salutes him and follows Lucas out of the room.

Steve sighs and extricates himself from his own cocoon of blankets, trudging into the kitchen where Robin’s already up and fixing breakfast in a fresh change of clothes from her suitcase. There are four plates of scrambled eggs and bacon lining the counter, and she’s making more. Steve flashes her a tired grin, and she returns it with one of her own. 

“Morning, Dingus,” she says, ignoring his eye-roll at the nickname. “Did you hear Lucas and Dustin’s lovers’ quarrel?”

“Woke up to it, actually,” he says, and she laughs, tipping her head back as she flips the eggs in the pan. 

Dustin and Lucas trail into the kitchen, teeth brushed and hair combed, and Max and El head for the bathroom next. 

“Thanks, Robin!” Dustin exclaims, snagging a plate and digging in, and Lucas smiles at her in thanks before doing the same. 

“So, what’d you guys do on your trip?” Dustin asks when he’s halfway done with his breakfast. 

“Went to an art exhibit, listened to a shit ton of Madonna, yelled at a woman on the street,” Robin says, ticking each item off on her fingers. “I poured my coffee over her head. Hey, speaking of coffee--”

She gestures to a full pot by the stove, and Steve lunges for it, pouring himself a cup. 

Max and El, now bright-eyed and dressed in clothes from Max’s suitcase, do the same, much to Robin’s dismay. 

“Guys, the last time you drank coffee, El’s powers went berserk and she knocked all the pictures off of Steve and I’s living room wall. I thought we agreed on--”

“You’re not our mom,” El cuts her off, grinning mischievously. Max stares at her in awed delight before levelling Robin with her I-dare-you-to-argue stare. 

“Yeah, you’re not our mom. Steve is,” Max says, and then Robin’s grinning too, and Steve sighs and takes his hands off his hips, which just makes everyone laugh. 

By the time Will and Jonathan walk into the kitchen, it’s full of laughter that seems to bounce off the walls, enveloping the whole room in warmth despite the snow that’s falling outside. Jonathan smiles at Steve across the room and the flurry of movement as Will lunges for the last plate of eggs before Dustin can get his hands on it, Lucas pulling him back by the collar while El launches fridge magnets at all of them with her mind. 

“You’re cleaning those up, El,” Steve tells her, pointing authoritatively the way Hop does when he means business. El just smiles at him and dumps more sugar into her coffee while Robin watches in silent horror. 

By the time Steve, Jonathan, and Robin have herded all the little dipshits into Jonathan’s and Steve’s cars-- which takes longer than it should because all of the kids break out into an argument over who’s riding with who-- it’s eight forty-five, and Steve floors it to the Wheeler’s house while Dustin and Lucas shriek along to “Fire in Cairo” in the backseat, playing air guitar and shaking their heads and rolling down the windows to let the cold morning air flood into the car, laughing when they get the words wrong or come in at the wrong time.

When Steve pulls into the Wheeler’s driveway after Jonathan, the sky an open blanket of white above them, the front door is already swinging open as Max, Will, and El rush towards the porch. Steve pulls into park and Dustin and Lucas hop out one after the other, just as eager to see Mike. 

Steve and Robin and Jonathan trail after them, and the kids all crowd around Mike on the porch, Will tugging him into a hug. Behind him, Nancy stands in the foyer, arms crossed as she observes all the kids talking and laughing, and she meets Steve’s eyes and grins over the huddle that The Party’s formed in front of the door. 

“Alright, weirdos, get inside,” Jonathan says, shoving them towards the door. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”

“Swear jar!” El crows delightedly. “That’s--”

“Five dollars, I know,” Jonathan says resignedly. Steve laughs into his shoulder, pulling him into the warmth of the Wheeler’s house. 

Once everyone’s inside, Nancy leads them to the kitchen, where she’s dragged the table out into the center of the room so they can all crowd around it and work on their project-- “Designing a board game that incorporates the literary themes of ‘White Noise’,” Dustin explains--, and she rolls out a poster-board and sets boxes of markers around the table while they debate about what to include in the board game.

Steve, Robin, and Jonathan cop seats at the Wheeler’s kitchen bar, watching the dipshits with thinly-veiled amusement while Nancy attempts to micro-manage them. She read ‘White Noise’ in her freshman year, and she’s eager to help them with their project, but Steve’s pretty sure they don’t need another creative conflict right about now. 

“The main theme is fear of death,” Max is saying, “So we should make our board game about that. Like, the object of the game is to avoid all these lethal obstacles, and--”

“What is ‘lethal’?” El asks. 

“Deadly,” Dustin supplies. “And I agree with you, Max, really, but I think we should incorporate multiple themes, like the theme of control.”

Max crosses her arms and juts her chin out. “O-kay,” she drawls, “So tell me, Dustin, how exactly would we incorporate that into the project?”

He falters for a second, one finger in the air, like, ‘hold on, I’m thinking,’ and El snickers while Lucas traces out the board game’s design, not even bothering to use a ruler. 

“Hey, what the hell are you doing, man?” Mike says, and Lucas looks up at him obliviously.

“Uh, what does it look like? I’m actually doing the work while the REST of you ARGUE--”

“That line is NOT straight,” Mike says, pushing past a ranting Max to point at the line in question. It is, from Steve’s angle, decidedly extremely crooked. Like, it’s a centimeter from going off of the page, which is pretty shitty. Robin laughs harder, and Nancy shoots her a look, but she’s smiling, too. 

While Mike and Lucas fight over the aesthetics of the project and Max debates with Dustin on the logistics of their approach, Will and El beg Nancy to make everyone hot chocolate. The others are too busy arguing to notice their lack of participation, but Steve is willing to bet that even if they did, they wouldn’t care. Will and El are given a lot of free passes when it comes to school, given the fact that the Upside Down stole actual years from them academically. 

“Nancy, we’re absolutely PARCHED,” El’s pleading, and Jonathan loses it at her wording. The kid’s picking up a shit ton of new vocabulary from books and TV and movies, but she sometimes forgets that not every word she hears is common in the present. A week or two ago, Hopper almost died when she’d called Mike “pigeon-livered” after he refused to help her reenact a scene from I Love Lucy. 

“Yeah, Nancy, we’re parched!” Will says, smiling wide at Jonathan, who’s laid his head down on the kitchen bar to hide his laughter. Robin snickers into her water glass. 

“They’re parched, Nance,” she says, tilting her head imploringly, and Nancy grins at her and goes, “Fine, fine, come over here and I’ll show you how to make it.”

While Nancy lines up brightly-patterned mugs on the counter and shakes hot cocoa powder into each of them, Max throws her hands up into the air exasperatedly. 

“I’m not sacrificing my brilliance to accommodate your stupid idea, Dusty-bun--”

“Hey!” Dustin snaps, “Only Suzie gets to call me that, got it?”

“Hey, idiots,” Mike drawls, glaring at them dejectedly, “Great news: Neither of you have to sacrifice your idea, because our project’s already ruined.”

“I’m FIXING it,” Lucas yells from where he’s bent over the table, frantically dabbing WhiteOut on the crooked Sharpie line. 

“Jesus, man, just flip the board over,” Mike grumbles.

“All I’m saying is, there are probably five other groups doing theirs on fear of death, so why not go all out and do ours on more than one theme?” Dustin’s asking Max. 

She rolls her eyes at him, and Steve nudges Robin, like, ‘look, it’s you in kid form.’

“Because what’s the point of doing more work than we have to if it won't even earn us extra credit?”

“Who says it won’t?”

“Uh, Mr. Higgs? He’s never given anyone extra credit in his entire teaching career.”

“And you know that based on intel from whom?” Dustin asks, tilting his head at her all smug. God, this kid. 

“Uh, intel from MYSELF that he’s a massive DICK--”

“We made hot chocolate!” Will yells, and the kids pause in their English Project War to rush into the main part of the kitchen and grab the steaming mugs of cocoa that Nancy’s set out for them. She smiles when Dustin puts a couple extra marshmallows in Max’s mug when she isn’t looking, and frowns when Lucas spits in Mike’s when he sets it down to hand Will a napkin. 

Before anyone can warn him, Mike grabs his mug off the counter and takes a huge gulp. El’s eyes widen in mortification--like Steve, Robin, and Nancy, she’d seen the whole thing unfold. Jonathan would have, but he’s too busy laughing at Will, who’s got a hot chocolate mustache. 

“Pretty good hot chocolate, huh, Mike?” Lucas asks.

“Lucas,” Robin says, disgusted, and Lucas giggles like the little shit he is. 

“What?” Mike snaps, immediately suspicious. He points at Lucas, and El starts to laugh. “What did you do?”

“He spit in your cocoa,” Dustin deadpans, and Mike’s eyes bug out comically. His hand flies to his mouth, and then he’s spitting into the sink as Lucas and Dustin lose their shit, and Will’s glaring at Lucas but his mouth is twisting like he’s trying super hard not to laugh. El buries her face in Max’s shoulder, who just sips her cocoa and shakes her head at all of her friends. Steve locks eyes with Nancy again, and she shrugs at him, like, ‘What can you do?’

“You are SICK, Sinclair,” Mike says once he’s washed out his mouth. Will restrains him while Lucas cowers behind Dustin, who looks like he wishes he could record all of this.

“Okay, you know what? Let’s make this even,” Nancy says, and Robin starts giggling like she knows exactly what Nance is about to suggest. Jonathan shakes his head, and Steve wonders what he’s missing. 

“Mike, spit into Lucas’s hot chocolate so you can settle the score.”

The scowl drops from Mike’s face, and he looks at Nance like he’s seeing her clearly for the first time in years. “Wait, really?”

Nancy pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs. “It’s the only way I can think of to dissolve the conflict. Sorry, Lucas, you brought this on yourself.”

Lucas sighs as El recoils and Max finishes the last of her mug. 

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Robin says. “They’re in high school, and they act like they’re five.”

As Lucas chugs the cocoa Mike’s just spit in, Jonathan squeezes his eyes shut in disgust. “It doesn’t surprise me anymore, but it’s still. . . horrifying to witness.”

“Tell me about it,” says Max. She’s at the kitchen table, tracing over Lucas’s uneven lines with a steady hand. El watches over her shoulder with a small smile on her face. 

“Pretty,” she says. 

Max kisses her on the forehead as Dustin cheers Lucas on in the background and Mike glowers at them for turning his revenge into a game, Will putting a comforting arm around his shoulders. “So are you.”

They finish their project at around lunchtime, and Steve has to admit that despite their initial creative conflict, it looks pretty damn good. Will’s drawn death traps all across the board to accommodate Max’s theme, and Mike and Lucas partnered up to write out a bunch of cards determining players’ fate to tie in Dustin’s idea about control. El made a ten-sided origami dice with her powers, and Dustin colored in the game board spaces in earth tones. At one point, they had to employ Robin’s help to fix a rip in the paper due to how hard Dustin was bearing down with the crayons (the kid is weirdly aggressive with his art), but other than that, it went relatively smoothly. 

Steve’s proud of them. 

Jonathan orders them two boxes of pizza to celebrate, and they all sprawl out on the Wheeler’s living room floor (even though there’s a couch) to watch a couple of episodes of ‘Leap in the Dark’ while they eat, talking and laughing and filling the house up with a feeling that Steve’s come to associate with sunlight, even though the sky outside is hazy-white and cloudy. 

Nancy’s house is warm, and he can relax here with all the kids in one place, surrounded by Jonathan and Rob and Nance and their quiet understanding. 

While the kids unwind in the living room, Steve finds his gaze lingering on Max. Her parents are probably wondering where she is, or her mom, at least. . . he knows they should get her home, but she’s laughing at something Lucas has said, and she looks so happy and free and he doesn’t want to send her back into her cage of a house so soon, not after the way she’d stowed away in his car just to escape it, not after the way she’d stared at that painting, outlined the shadow.

Someone’s hand is on his shoulder. 

“Hey,” Jonathan says, soft in his ear. “You’re far away. What’s up?”

Steve tries for a smile, shaking his head to clear the memories away like snow. “Nothing. Nothing, sorry, just tired.”

Jonathan nods in understanding, presses a kiss to Steve’s temple. “Gotcha. You can sleep if you want, y’know. I know you did a lot of driving yesterday.”

“I’m good,” Steve tells him, dropping his head onto Jonathan’s shoulder and sighing as Nancy and Robin’s laughter envelopes him. “Everything’s fine.”

\---

“Alright, kiddo, this is you,” Steve says, smiling at Max in the rearview mirror as he pulls into her driveway. She and El are the only two left in his car; Will went home with Jonathan and Robin, who wanted to visit Joyce to talk about her housing application for NYU. Steve agreed to drop off Lucas and Dustin and the rest of them, which was a stupid decision because now he feels like shit watching Max grab her bag from the floorboard of his car, rummaging through it to give him gas money. Stalling. 

“Max, you don’t owe me anything.”

“But--”

“No buts,” he tells her, smiling when El giggles. Max’s brow furrows, and he says, “Listen, I know you saw Nance pay me for gas, but you don’t have to do that, okay? You’re a kid. Now c’mon, outta the car. I know your mom misses you.”

“Bye, Maxie,” El says in this soft voice Steve’s rarely heard her use, and Max smiles-- forces a smile, Steve sees it, how unnatural it is-- and pulls her into a hug. 

When she gets out of the car and passes his window, Steve rolls it down and leans halfway out of the car. 

“Hey, Max.”

She turns, looks at him questioningly, and he notes that her posture’s already changed: her shoulders are hunched up, and maybe it’s just because it’s cold, but he can’t see it that way, not now. 

“Yeah?”

“I’m gonna buy you that skateboard tomorrow, okay? Tell your mom Rob and The Party and I will pick you up at ten.” 

She stares at him, and her mouth falls open a little, and then El says, “Why are you crying?”

And shit, El’s right, she’s crying. Her lip’s quivering, and her shoulders are shaking, and she’s frozen in place between Steve’s car and her house. He’s frozen too, for a second, because this is Max: strong-willed, take-no-shit, invincible Max, crying in the cold, and then El’s unlocking the car door with her powers and hopping out of the backseat, and Steve comes back to himself, throws open the driver’s side door. 

When he reaches Max, El’s already hugging her, but she pulls away to look at him and he wishes desperately for a moment that Rob was here, because he can’t deal with this, can’t fix her, and she’s still crying and he thinks El is, too, even though she doesn’t know why Max is upset. 

“Max, what is it?” Steve asks, and her face crumples and on instinct he opens his arms, and she falls into the hug and buries her face in his shoulder, shaking from the cold or the fear or both, and he locks eyes with El over her shoulder. She’s watching them with this decades-old wisdom on her face, so much like Will that he almost does a double take. She flicks her gaze towards Max’s house, then back to him, and shakes her head almost imperceptibly. 

He always forgets how much more El knows about the world than he does. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says, and Max cries even harder, and Steve feels his heart swell with this frantic pity, the kind he felt for Robin when her parents kicked her out, for the kids when they had anxiety attacks, for Jonathan when he had nightmare after nightmare. 

“Max, it’s okay,” he says again, pulling back from the hug and planting his hands on her shoulders to ground her. She doesn’t flinch, and he counts it as a win. “Listen, listen to me. I’m taking you to El’s, and you’re gonna sleep over, and I’m gonna have a talk with Hop about this, okay? You don’t have to talk about it until you’re ready, you can. . . you can watch Disney movies with El in her room, I’ll make you popcorn. Everything’s gonna be alright.”

Max searches his face like she’s looking for a sign that he’s lying, and Steve remembers the way he’d done the same thing with Joyce when she’d told him he could stay at the Byers’ house with Robin. 

“I promise, we won’t make you go back there,” he says, and she nods like she believes him, and El takes her hand as snow starts coming down around them. 

“Okay?” Steve says. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” Max breathes, like she can’t believe it, and Steve leads them back to the warmth of the car, turns the radio to a fuzzy, jazzy Christmas station that’s loud enough to fill the silence but soft enough to give them all breathing room, and peels out of the driveway, heading for Hopper’s cabin and hoping the guy has some microwaveable popcorn in his pantry. 

\---

After Hopper’s sent El and Max to El’s room to change into fuzzy pajamas, popped them three bags of popcorn (“The good kind,” El assured them), and called Joyce to tell her Steve would be late to Byers Family Movie Night and El would be sitting this one out, Steve sits down across from him at a surprisingly spotless kitchen table and gives him as much detail as he can on Max’s situation. Throughout his explanation, Hopper remains stoically calm, only expressing his surprise through raised eyebrows or a pointed frown. 

Steve wishes he could be that calm about this, but it’s Max. It’s one of his kids. 

“And that’s pretty much it. I mean, I’m sure Mike could tell you more about it than I can; he’s the one she’s been going to about all of it. Maybe he could talk to you tomorrow.”

Hopper sips at his coffee and nods, clearing his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I could call him up to the station.”

A beat of silence stretches between them. Steve feels impatience coil in his gut. 

“So, what do we do? I mean, what can we do to help her?”

“Well,” Hopper says, “You made the right decision by telling me. I knew Niel wasn’t a man of flawless character, but. . . God, if I’d known about this. . . Okay. Okay, so here’s what we can do right now: We file a report, and we launch an investigation. Legally, we can’t remove Max from her home without an investigation and a court case and all the mandatory bullshit, but. .. she can stay over here as often as she needs to. We’ll keep her as safe as we can, son.”

Steve hates that he can hear the strain in his voice when he speaks. “How safe is ‘as safe as you can’, though?”

Hopper’s face hardens, and he leans over the table. “I can’t guarantee anything, kid, but I’ll be damned if that son of a bitch lays another finger on her. I promise we’re going to do everything in our power to help her, okay?”

Steve sighs, feels the fight drain out of him. He can hear El and Max laughing in El’s room, and it lightens him a little.”Okay.”

On his way out the door, Hop says, “You’re a good kid, Steve,” and pats him on the shoulder, and as he drives away from the cabin and towards the Byers’ house, he replays the moment in his mind while the snow falls harder, trying to convince himself that it’s true. 

When he knocks on the Byers’ door, Jonathan answers. His face brightens when he sees Steve, and he tugs him into a hug. Steve wraps his arms around him, breathes him in. It’s barely five p.m., but all he wants to do right now is cuddle with Jonathan in his room and sleep. 

Instead, he follows him inside, grinning at a laughing Robin. She’s sprawled out on the Byers’ living room couch, trying to teach Will how play cards, but the kid’s absorbed in his own project: he’s constructed a castle out of half of the deck, christened it “Castle Byers II” with a little sign he cut out of notebook paper. 

“Hey, Rob,” Steve greets, plopping down beside her on the couch as Jonathan flops dramatically into an armchair. “What movie did you decide on?”

Robin giggles. “I think you mean, what movie did your stuck-up film-snob boyfriend decide on?” 

Jonathan mock-glares at her and tosses a pillow at her head. She catches it. “I’m sorry I wasn’t willing to spend two hours of my night watching FOOTLOOSE, Robin!”

“It’s a good movie!” she shrieks, and Steve throws his head back and laughs when Jonathan chucks another pillow at her and hits her square in the chest. 

“It is NOT. Red Dawn is a good movie, which is why we’re watching it--”

“Guys, I made popcorn!” Joyce calls out from the kitchen, and Will stands up so fast he sends Castle Byers II tumbling across the carpet.

He stares at it for a half-second, and Robin and Jonathan even pause in their pillow fight for a moment of silence, but Will just shrugs. “It’s fine, I needed to remodel anyway.”

While Will grabs the two bowls of popcorn Joyce has made and carries them into the living room, Steve turns on the TV and pops Fast Times into the DVD player while Robin and Jonathan bicker on in the background, oblivious. 

“Hey,” Jonathan says when the titlecard fades in, “This isn’t Red Dawn.”

“Or Footloose,” Robin adds.

“Footloose was never on the table--”

“Well, Fast Times was directed by a woman, Rob,” Steve says, “And it has great reviews, Jon. So I made an executive decision.”

“Female directors. . . that I can get behind,” Robin concedes, and Joyce high-fives her on her way to the other armchair. 

“Guys, can you please keep it down?” Will asks. “Castle Byers II is under reconstruction.”

“Sorry, buddy,” Jonathan says, and that’s that.

As the movie drones on and Steve feels the day’s exhaustion seep into his bones, Robin scoots closer to him so he can rest his head on her shoulder. She knows he’s tired, can see it on his face, in the worried twist of his hands in his lap. He thinks maybe something in the drugs the Russians pumped them full of tuned her into his thoughts, made her a one-way telepath like Dustin’s shitty ham radio. He wishes he could read her the same way. 

When the film is over, Jonathan shakes him awake. Outside, the sky has darkened, and Joyce has turned the porch light off, which means Steve is required by Byers Law to stay the night, He follows Rob into the guest room, the one El stays at when she sleeps over, and they fall into their separate beds without even changing into pajamas. Steve can’t see Robin in the grainy darkness, but he can make out the steady rise and fall of her chest as her breathing slows and sleep pulls her under. He does this sometimes, watches her sleep; not in a creepy way, Jesus, he just wants to make sure she’s okay. Needs to make sure she’s okay. 

Even though he’s tired, even though he still has a goddamn crick in his neck and he’s pretty sure he’s getting a stress headache (Nancy complained about hers all the time when they were dating, took ibuprofen by the handful before class), Steve can’t sleep. His brain is stuck on a memory like it gets sometimes, stuck like El’s broken record player that Hop keeps promising to fix but always forgets about. 

Max in her driveway, her eyes pooling with tears, the earthquake of her shoulders when he pulled her close to him; Steve can’t shake it. Can’t go to sleep without knowing she’s alright.

Which is how he finds himself dialing Hop’s home phone at two in the morning in the half-dark hall, hands shaking even though he knows the kid’s probably dead asleep in El’s arms, probably fine. 

The Chief picks up on the third ring. 

“Joyce? Are you okay, what’s. . . what’s going on?”

“Not Joyce,” Steve says, his throat constricting. “Sorry for calling so late, I-- I just. Is Max doing okay? I mean, is she sleeping alright?”

Hopper sighs on the other end of the line, but he doesn’t sound mad, or even annoyed. There’s something. . . he sounds like Robin does when Steve wakes up from a nightmare. 

“Kid, she’s fine. I had a talk with her and El before they went to bed, and she cried, and hugged me, and. . . she’s gonna be just fine. I promise. You don’t need to shoulder her pain right now, okay? I mean, Jesus, it’s. . . two a.m. It’s two in the morning, kid.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, because something about this just feels wrong, like he’s crossed a line, invaded their space, and he can’t take it back. He feels exhaustion tugging at his bones, wants to be able to surrender to it, but all he can think about is how fragile she seemed earlier, how wrong and un-Max-like it was. 

“Don’t do that, don’t apologize,” Hopper tells him, and there’s something. . . there’s something about the way he says it, something about it that reminds Steve of his dad before he got that stupid promotion and all that stupid money and started leaving for long stretches of time. 

“Listen, kid, you’ve gotta get some sleep, alright? You can drive over and take her to get that skateboard tomorrow afternoon, just. . . go to sleep.”

Steve swallows thickly, lets his eyes shut against the glow of the lamp Jonathan left on in the living room. 

“Okay. Thank you, Chief.”

“Don’t mention it, son.”

And then the dial tone rings in Steve’s ear, and he sets the phone back on the hook and leans his head against the wall, feels the tiredness well up in him like a river, thinks that maybe he can sleep here, standing up, instead of in the same room as Robin because sometimes the sound of her breathing takes up so much space he feels like he’s suffocating. 

It’s Jonathan’s voice that pulls him back to the surface.

“Hey, what are you doing up?”

Steve cracks his eyes open, blinks groggily at Jonathan, like, ‘Hey, I’m sleepin’ here,’ but Jon doesn’t get it and moves towards him, places a warm hand on the back of Steve’s neck. 

“Steve. I heard you on the phone. Why are you up?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” he sighs out, squeezing his eyes shut. “I. . . Max is in trouble. At home, I mean. I mean, she’s in trouble all the time, with her step-dad, and I took her over to El’s and talked to Hop before I drove here, but. . . I kept worrying about her. So I called him. Probably shouldn’t have done that.”

Jonathan stares at him all soft-eyed, and Steve kind of wants to cry. He feels like he’s done something wrong, like he’s too much for everyone. 

“Hey, look at me,” Jonathan says, and when Steve does he’s smiling this quiet smile and Steve can kind of breathe again even though he thinks he should be too tired to breathe at this point. 

“Steve, everything’s okay. I promise. You just need to sleep, just-- come here,” Jonathan murmurs, pulling him close and guiding him back down the hall. “You didn’t get enough sleep last night, and today was really draining for you, that’s why you’re so tired,” he explains, and Steve guesses that’s sound logic, but it still doesn’t account for--

“And it’s why you’re so emotional,” Jonathan adds, and oh. He guesses it does account for that. 

“Not that that’s a bad thing,” he continues as he pushes the door to his room open. It’s a practiced movement, silent so the door doesn’t creak. Steve is grateful for the running monologue-- Jonathan is quiet by nature, but he knows Steve needs noise to fill up the silence sometimes, even if the noise is whispered and accompanied by a struggle to peel back his quilt while he’s still supporting half of Steve’s weight.

“It’s not a bad thing to be emotional, okay? Really, it’s not. It means you’re a good person,” he’s saying, pressing a kiss to Steve’s temple. “It means you care, and that’s always a good thing.”

The quilt is over them now, and it’s heavy, heavy like Steve’s whole body because he’s so, so tired, and he feels like someone scooped out his guts and stuffed him with cotton instead, feels like there’s a film over him, caging him in. Caging him in like the girl in the painting. 

“Hey, look at me,” Jon’s saying, so Steve does. 

“I’ve got you, and Max is safe, and everything is gonna be okay.” Jonathan says, and he sounds so wildly sure of himself that Steve nods, feels the caged-in feeling melt away as Jonathan winds an arm around Steve’s shoulder and pulls him close, and there’s enough breathing room between them that everything weighing Steve down unravels itself from him and slides into the open air, slides out Jonathan’s cracked-open window into the grainy, still night. 

And he thinks, before sleep finally pulls him under, that Jon’s right. That everything will sort itself out. 

\---

The next day, the sky is the same shade of blue as Robin’s eyes. 

He counts it as a good omen. 

“Guys, wake up!” Will is yelling, and Jonathan throws a pillow at his door like that’ll shut the kid up. 

“Ignore him,” he tells Steve, but now there’s a weird clanging coming from the kitchen that Steve can only imagine is Will banging pots and pans together. 

“Steve! And! Jonathan!” He yells, banging the pans together after each word for emphasis, “Max! Says! You need to get up so we can go get her skateboard!” 

He bangs the pans three times after this sentence for good measure. 

Jonathan sighs, cups his hands around his mouth, and yells, “SHUT! UP!”

“Dingus, I’m eating all the waffles!” Robin sings, and that’s enough to get Steve up and moving. 

He feels worlds better, like all his bones got rearranged into an order that fit overnight. And yeah, okay, maybe he still isn't up to a hundred percent, because his stream of consciousness doesn’t usually supply him with bone metaphors, but at this point he doesn’t really care because Rob probably actually IS eating all the waffles, and he can’t let that happen, dammit. 

He trudges over to Jonathan’s dresser and pulls out a pair of jeans and a hoodie, then makes a beeline for the bathroom. 

By the time he gets to the kitchen, Jonathan’s already there, and Steve brightens when he slides a plate of waffles across the counter to him. “Saved you these.”

“Have I told you lately how much I love you?” Steve says, grinning when Jonathan blushes and Will and Robin pull the same grossed-out face at each other. They’re still a dynamic duo, all wit and comic quirkiness, and Steve feels a rush of affection for both of them. Their hair is the same shade in the early morning sunlight, and they’ve rebuilt Castle Byers II on the trusty surface of the kitchen counter. 

“Okay,” Will says after taking a gulp of orange juice, “So here’s the plan: we’re going to Hopper’s cabin after breakfast to pick up El and Max, then to Mike’s where Dustin and Lucas are to pick them up, then to the Hawkins’ Sports Center to buy Max’s skateboard, and THEN to the arcade because Dustin swears he knows cheat codes to Dig Dug that can earn us, like, a million tickets. El’s been eyeing this Gizmo plushie for weeks, and we really wanna get it for her.”

Steve looks at Robin, then at Jonathan, and they nod in unison, resigned to their fate. 

It’s gonna be a good day. 

“Alright, dipshits, in the car!” Steve yells over the music, waving Mike, Dustin and Lucas over. They pile into the back-back (dubbed “The Pits of Unrelenting Doom” by Dustin and “The Backseat II” by Will), grumbling as they fight over who has to sit in the middle. Steve’s in the driver’s seat, and Robin’s on the passenger’s side, waving at Nancy through her open window. Jonathan stayed home to help Joyce clean up the Post-Byers-Movie-Night living room, and tackle the dishes, because she has a date with Hopper tonight and could use an extra pair of hands. 

“I’ll come over later tonight, alright, Nance?” Rob shouts over ‘Road to Nowhere’.

“Okay!” Nancy shouts back, grinning even though she has to be freezing on the porch in her t-shirt and ripped jeans. 

“Nancy, I love your hair!” Max yells. El nods emphatically beside her, and Nancy smiles impossibly wider, waving one last time before she rushes inside to the warmth of the foyer. 

“Mike, your sister is so cool,” Max says, and Mike rolls his eyes as Robin high-fives her. 

“She’s alright.”

“She’s killed, like, a million monsters,” Will reminds him, and Mike huffs a sigh. 

“I know. She’s still annoying.”

“Quiet, dipshits,” Steve snaps, shaking his head like an exasperated dad when El and Max break into giggles at the sunglasses he’s put on. “What? It’s bright as hell out, today, I need my UV ray protection.”

“Eyes on the road, Dingus,” Robin says. 

“We’re in a residential area, Rob.”

“‘A residential’-- are you high right now?”

The kids’ laughter crescendos; Steve’s on a roll this morning. Maybe it’s just the music. 

“Uh, could a high person do this?” he asks, taking both hands off the wheel. The car swerves wildly, the kids shrieking in the back, and Robin lunges across the console to grab the wheel and steer them back into the right lane as they near the exit of the Wheeler’s neighborhood. 

“We’re on a road to no-where!” Steve crows along with the music, and Lucas and Dustin scramble to join in, laughing when Robin glares daggers at them in the rearview.

“Dingus, if you don’t get your act together, I’m going to castrate you,” she grits out, and Steve laughs, taking the steering wheel back and steadying the car’s pace. They peel out onto the road leading to Hawkins’ Sports Center, The Talking Heads still floating through the car, and Robin relaxes. 

“What, you didn’t think I’d actually endanger the dipshits, did you?” he asks, and she huffs out a laugh. 

“No, I just--”

“Okay, realistically, Steve’s endangered us on numerous occasions, and out of all of them this was pretty tame--”

“Henderson!”

“What?! I said it was tame!”

They’re still bickering when Steve pulls into the parking lot and all of the kids spill out of the car, all talking over each other about what kind of skateboard Max should get, and she’s trailing behind them with a quiet grin on her face that reminds him of El. She’s walking beside Max, swinging their joined hands between them, and they’re talking quietly. 

Steve and Robin hop out last and rush ahead of the kids like teachers leading a field trip. 

Steve pulls open the store’s heavy glass door, and Robin leads them in, winking at the girl behind the counter at the check-out. 

“What would Nancy say about that?” Steve asks, and Rob glowers at him. 

“For your information, Nance and I are secure enough in our relationship that we can flirt absently with cute girls in public,” she says, all matter-of-fact, and Steve bites back a laugh. 

“Whatever you say, Buckley. Whatever you say.”

“You should get that one,” Will’s saying up ahead of them, pointing at a forest-green board near the top of the skateboard rack. Max eyeballs it for a second, shakes her head. 

“That one, then,” Dustin says, gesturing grandly at a longer board with flames decorating the bottom of it. 

“Dude, that is so tacky,” Mike drawls. “Max, get whichever one feels right to you.”

Max stares at him for a second, and Steve sees it again: the Steve-and-Robin mirror, in real time. They’re facing each other like he and Robin are right now, looking like they know something the others don’t. He remembers the way she’d slumped against him in the car, the way his initial surprise had melted into understanding, into acceptance. Remembers it and thinks of the night he’d picked Robin up from the phone-booth after her parents kicked her out, how they’d tangled together like puzzle pieces. 

Max and Mike fit together now, the same way Steve and Robin do. 

“Yeah, okay,” Max says, her eyes skimming the skateboards, the different lengths and weights and colors; the patterned ones, the ones you can spray paint and draw on. 

The others leave her to it, retire to other areas of the store: Dustin and Lucas head for the rows of mountain bikes, loudly daring each other to ride them around the store; Will and Mike peruse the aisles of outdoor games, looking for accessories for the Wheeler’s new in-ground pool that will supposedly be done by summer; El makes a beeline for the weights section and covertly tests out her powers on the heavier dumbbells. 

Steve and Robin try to keep an eye on all of them from the center of the store, but he guesses they look kind of weird and suspicious doing that, so he drags her into a random aisle and they end up chucking basketballs at each other until Max says, “Found it!”

They all hurry back to the skateboard section like a demodog hivemind, and the girl behind the counter is definitely watching them now, looking vaguely annoyed by the amount of activity happening at nine in the morning in the dead of winter. 

Max is holding a bright red board, longer and heavier than her last one, and she’s grinning so brightly that Steve kind of wants to buy out the whole store for her. 

“Classic,” Mike says admirably, and Max smiles wider, flips the board over. Decorating the bottom is Wonder Woman in all her comic book glory, and El bounces on the balls of her feet excitedly. 

“Diana Prince!”

“No, that’s Wonder Woman, El,” Dustin says, missing the look of incredulity Lucas shoots him. Robin hides her laugh in Steve’s shoulder. 

“A powerful skateboard for a powerful lady,” Robin says, and Max fist-bumps her as they parade to the check-out. 

Steve winks at the cashier when he slides his credit card across the counter, and she glances between Robin and Steve and all of the shitheads behind them like she’s a computer incapable of processing something. 

“We’re their parents,” Robin tells her, and her mouth falls open as the kids erupt into laughter, leading the way out the door and back into Steve’s car, already fighting again about who’s riding in the back, Max clutching her skateboard to her chest and looking like Steve’s just bouth her the moon. 

“I am NOT riding in the Pits of Unrelenting Doom,” Dustin’s saying, shaking his head vehemently when Mike points at him mid-lecture. “Mike, don’t you point at me, I refuse. I refuse.”

“Well, Lucas and I already did, and we can’t make Max do it because it’s Be Nice To Max Day, and we can’t make El do it because it’s El--”

“I’ll ride in the Backseat II,” El tells them, and Mike shakes his head. 

“Absolutely not, you’ve been through enough.”

“It’s not called the Backseat II, it’s the Pits of Unrelenting Doom,” Dustin says, and all of them groan in unison like they’ve had that conversation a million times before. 

“Really, I don’t care, I’ll ride in the back-back,” El presses, and finally Mike relents. El hops into the back-back (the Backseat II? The Pits of Unrelenting Doom? Steve doesn’t care), and Will follows her, leaving the backseat to Lucas, Max, and Mike, who lay Max’s skateboard across their laps and look at it in silent, appreciative awe as Steve drives them to the arcade, sunglasses still on, singing to ‘Road to Nowhere’ again because it’s just that good, dammit. 

“And we’re not little children, and we know, what we wa-ant,” Robin sings with him, laughing hysterically when Mike breaks out into these stupid dance moves in the backseat, the rest of the kids following suit, and Steve rolls down the windows and lets the cold-cold air rush in and wind around them like yarn, tying them together, to this moment, to their hopes for Dustin’s cheat codes to work and Robin’s silent wish for the day to fly by so she can go to Nancy’s and Max’s quiet thank-you that she’s trying to send telepathically to Steve over the sound of the drums and the horns and whatever weird honking thing Dustin’s doing in the back (seriously, the kid sounds like a damn goose). 

That’s what Steve gets for trying to be poetic; he’s not Jonathan, okay? Jesus. 

When they pull into the arcade parking lot, the song’s ended and the kids are bobbing their heads less enthusiastically to ‘This Must Be the Place’, El singing quietly in her pretty, wispy voice. 

Steve cuts the music, and they parade out of the car again (“Dustin, get your elbow out of my eye--” “I’m SORRY, Jesus!”) and into the glowing half-dark of the arcade, their faces lighting up as Dig Dug comes into view. Dustin pulls an intricately-folded sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolds it, muttering to himself like a madman. The dipshits crowd around him, talking over each other about the cheat codes while Will and El take turns playing Pac-Man a few feet away. 

Rob and Steve hang back, pulling their coats off and whispering to each other while Dustin launches an attack on the game, Lucas calling out the cheat codes to him as he flips switches and hits buttons frantically and the others cheer him on. 

“You really think Max is okay?” Steve asks Rob. She squints at him. 

“Dingus, she’s having the time of her life berating Dusty-buns right now,” she tells him, and sure enough, Max is screaming at Henderson like she’s a drill sergeant and he’s a rookie.

“Wait, hold on, why are we letting Dustin do this? Max is the Dig Dug king,” Mike interjects, and Max beams at him, and Dustin sighs and relinquishes his spot. 

“Those two have gotten closer, huh?” Robin asks him, pointing to Max and Mike: she’s flipping switches and hitting buttons with a practiced, brisk ease, nothing like Dustin’s frenzied attack, and Mike is reading off the codes to her and cheering when she passes level after level. 

“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Steve says, nodding. “They remind me of us.”

Rob grins at him,her face lit up neon pink by the games around them, and Steve grins back when she punches him in the shoulder. “Moron,” she whispers. 

“Moron,” he whispers back. 

The kids win the game. Like, they win it enough times to get El a Gizmo and Will a Pac-Man and Lucas a new sling-shot because the other one got covered in interdimensional monster sludge, and they’re all talking and laughing and overlapping each others’ stories as they shove their way back into Steve’s car, Dustin and Lucas and Mike begrudgingly retiring to Backseat Purgatory, a name they all compromised on. 

The sky is darkening outside by the time Steve’s dropped them all off at the Byers’ (it’s monthly Party sleepover night), and it’s pitch-black when he rolls into the Wheeler’s driveway again and Nancy and Jonathan meet them on the porch. 

“I made an executive decision to invite Jon over,” Nancy explains, pulling Robin into a hug, “Because I knew he wouldn’t want to be at home with the whole Party there and Joyce at Enzo’s with Hopper, so. Does Wheeler-Byers-Harrington-Buckley sleepover night sound good to you guys?”

“One question,” Robin says. “Can I be an honorary Harrington?”

“You can be an honorary Wheeler,” Nancy tells her, and Steve and Jonathan laugh as Rob blushes. 

Inside, Nance’s dad is passed out cold on the couch, and her mom’s at some PTA night at Hawkins Elementary for Holly, so they have free range of the kitchen and upstairs. 

Nancy and Jonathan just finished baking chocolate-chip cookies before Steve and Rob arrived, and they stand around in the kitchen together blowing on them and seeing if they can take bites without burning the roofs of their mouths. 

“Shit!” Steve grits out when one scalds him, like actually burns his mouth, dammit, and Robin cackles her raspy late-night laugh into the quiet while Nance gets him an ice cube to suck on from the fridge and Jon tries to burn his own mouth in solidarity. 

“Jonathan, don’t do that,” Steve snaps, batting his hand away from the cookies. “It’s not worth it.”

“Steve, I would die for you,” Jonathan deadpans, and Robin swoons. “I’m pretty sure I can handle a cookie.”

And then he shoves another one in his mouth and promptly spits it into the sink. 

Nancy gets him an ice cube, too. 

Later, they all pad upstairs in their winter socks, and Robin almost slips and falls to her death on the hardwood, but Steve catches her around the waist because he’s a gentleman, and she tells Nance she’s leaving her for him, so Nancy challenges him to a pillow fight that evolves into an all-out war with sides and betrayal and trenches made out of Nance’s comforter and pillows from Mike’s room. (“They’re clean, I swear on my life.” “They better be.”)

When Jonathan wins by tricking all of them into taking each other down, like the conniving bastard he is, they argue over what movie to watch for about thirty minutes until finally Rob decides to roll a dice and it lands on four, which is Footloose, which leads to Jonathan declaring independence from the Wheeler-Byers-Harrington clan and watching Red Dawn downstairs with an unconscious Ted Wheeler until he comes back upstairs and finds Nance and Rob asleep on Nancy’s floor in front of her tiny box TV, Steve sprawled out on the bed because they’re “floor people” and insisted he take it. 

“Alright, help me get them into bed,” he says, so Steve does, and they tuck the girls in because they’re gentlemen, and then Jonathan declares that he’s rejoining the Wheeler-Byers-Harrington union solely because Nance and Robin look adorable when they’re asleep, and Steve guesses that’s fair. 

When they’re cocooned in blankets on Nancy’s carpet, facing each other in the blue-tinged half-dark, Jonathan says, “Are you doing okay?”

Steve breathes in, closes his eyes against the intensity of Jonathan’s gaze. “Yeah, of course. Today was a great day.”

“Tiring, though.”

Steve opens his eyes, grins at Jon. “What, you playing therapist now, Byers?”

Jonathan sighs, smiling. “I just. . . I worry about you.”

“Well, I worry about you, so.”

Jonathan trails a finger up Steve’s arm; it makes him shiver. “We’re both just anxious messes then, huh.”

“Guess so.” Steve tangles their legs together. “Wouldn’t wanna be anyone else’s mess, though.”

Jonathan’s smile could power the Wheeler’s whole house, Christmas lights included. “Me either.”

He kisses Steve’s forehead, and calm washes over him, over the whole room. 

“Good night, Steve.”

“Night, Jon.”

\--

When they get to the Byers’ house the next morning, all the kids are packed in like sardines on the couch, dead to the world. Mike and Will are squished together, Dustin and Lucas beside them, Max and El on the end. They’re covered in blankets of varying colors, because El truly does have a problem, and Jonathan snaps a picture of them with his camera while Joyce flips pancakes in the kitchen and Hopper sips his coffee at the table. 

“Morning, kids,” he says by way of greeting, waving them over once Steve, Robin, Jonathan, and Nancy are all inside. 

They peel off their coats as Joyce tells them that Max is taking up residence in her guest room for a while. 

“Just until Hopper can launch an investigation,” she says calmly, piling the pancakes onto a big plate and lining up smaller paper ones for the kids on the counter. “I talked to Mrs. Mayfield over the phone about it, and we came to an agreement.” 

Steve has to marvel at the woman’s nonchalance. He knows how loving she is, how much she’s willing to sacrifice for any of them, but sometimes it still hits him all over again what an amazing mother she is. To her, this is nothing; she’s just doing what’s best for Max. But to Max, this is. . . everything. A refuge, a safe place for her to come home to after school and sleepovers at El’s. Finally. He knows the feeling. 

“That’s great,” Nancy’s saying, getting the butter out of the fridge, like, ‘just another Saturday,’ and Steve guesses it is. The thought fills him with this lightness, and it’s so sudden that he sways a little on his feet. 

As Jonathan washes strawberries in the sink and Robin slices the tops off of them (“We’re like an assembly line!” “Assembly lines have to be longer than two people, Robin.” “An assembly clump, then. A cluster? A pair. An assembly partnership.” “It’s eight in the morning.”), Steve looks back at the kids again, at El stirring awake and trying to extricate herself from the group without waking anyone else. She accidentally elbows Mike, though, who whines like a kicked puppy and wakes up Will, who kicks Dustin trying to escape the tangle of blankets, and then all of them are grumbling at each other like irate elderly people being woken from their afternoon nap. 

“Late night, anklebiters?” Hop asks, grinning at El and ruffling her air as she passes him. She kicks him in the shin under the table, and he curses. 

“What the hell, kid?”

“She’s in a mood because we made her watch The Neverending Story last night,” Mike says, trailing after El into the kitchen with a sleepy-eyed Will in tow. “The horse’s death upset her.”

“It would upset anyone,” Max says, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and following them into the kitchen, smiling when Rob hands her a strawberry. 

“Nancy cried at that scene,” Robin informs them, winking at Nancy when El visibly brightens. God, Steve loves his friends. 

Nancy gets the memo, nods emphatically at El while Dustin dumps a gallon of syrup over his pancakes and Lucas fake retches onto the kitchen floor. “Oh, yeah, that scene totally got me. I had to leave the theatre to collect myself.”

Mike rolls his eyes at her, like, ‘you’re overselling it,’ and she snaps her mouth shut. Steve laughs; El’s moved on, anyway, shaking Cocoa Puffs into a cereal bowl. 

“You don’t want pancakes, honey?” Joyce asks, plopping two on a plate for Robin, who’s left Jonathan to tend to the strawberries alone. 

El shakes her head as the kids crowd around the kitchen table and dig into their breakfast. “I only like waffles.”

“Weirdo,” Lucas says, grinning at El as he shovels pancakes into his mouth. She glowers at him, and the syrup bottle Mike brought to the table lifts of its own accord and douses his breakfast in an ocean that rivals Dustin’s. 

Lucas stares at it for a second, wide-eyed, before shrugging and resuming eating. Robin wrinkles her nose at him, and Hopper takes that as his cue to leave and join Joyce in front of the stove. 

While they talk in hushed tones about Max’s arrangement, the kids argue over who Max will teach to skateboard first, and she yells over them and says of course she’ll teach El first, and Rob and Nancy laugh when Mike gets this stricken look on his face; Jonathan snaps a picture of all of them, and Max sees and goes, “Oh, Jonathan, I borrowed one of your cameras,” and pulls it out of her overnight bag to show him the shots from their trip, and he tells her to keep it; Steve watches Dustin and Lucas fall over each other trying to see a picture of Mike with pizza sauce smeared down half of his face, and when El sees it she shrieks so loud Hopper almost spills his coffee, and throughout all of this Max has been laughing, looking rosy-cheeked and warm and safe in the Byers’ tiny kitchen, and Steve feels Robin lean into his side and Jonathan take his hand and Nancy ruffle his hair, and thinks, this is what it feels like to be un-caged.


End file.
